a reader
Equated Dissonance
a reader

1. Emily Roysdon, ‘​Queer Love’, ​2006.

From: ​Queer ​(Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art), Ed. David J.
Getsy, 2016.

2. Megan N. Burke, ‘​Love as a Hollow: Merleau-Ponty’s Promise of Queer

Love’, ​2017. (An excerpt)

3. Juana María Rodríguez, ​‘Pulse’, ​2018.

4. Ainslie Templeton, ‘​tiny eyes’ ​and ​‘piracy’, ​2017.

(Courtesy of the artist)

5. Sara Ahmed, ​‘Happiness and Queer Politics’, ​2014.

(An excerpt)

6. yung pueblo, An instagram post on love, 2017.

7. Anna T., ​‘The Opacity of Queer Languages’, ​2014.

(Via eflux #60, December 2014)
 The subject of my sexuality was officially closed in the family. I experimented
by storing the results of my consciously induced daytime emissions in a Pond's
cold cream jar. An appeasement to the Gods. However, not a good idea at the
height of a Delhi summer.
Moving on to the oral stage, still uninformed about consequences, it came as
a huge surprise that someone would use me as a cold cream jar.
Two years ago, I fell in love with the most beautiful Delhi man I had ever met.
Within a year it was over, unconsummated. He had found his Meera, he didn't
need sex, meaning me any more.
Last Saturday night I decided, enough was enough, I head out on the town. No
luck, club shuts and we're back out on the road. I see a man on a motorbike. He'll
do. I never chose celibacy. My friends hang out encouragingly. Back home, he just
lays there. No one's taught him anything. I minister my oral skills. He blows in
minutes. Doesn't make a move towards me. The night is over.
Will someone decriminalize the act? Spread basic information and bring
spontaneity and fun back into our Indian sex lives.
Sunil Gupta, columns Tor Today, Delhi (May 2006). (www.sunilgupta.net)
Emily Roysdon
Q.ueer tove//Z00ó
LOVE is a strategy, medium, site and scene. Love is an act. Love is not a quantifiable
element able to be parsed between politics and poetics for it constantly
translorms the definitions of those very terms. Before I speal< economy and
resistance I must be explicit - Queer love. Queer love exemplifies itself by its lack
ofsingular object relations and an insistence on unstable and mutable boundaries.
My insistence on queer love is because the unspoken alternative would be
hetero-normative love. Distinguishing this discourse of love as one that implicitly
speaks queer love we do not take lor granted modes of reproduction, exchange
values or teleological engagements. We allow simultaneous investments,
contradiction, excess, relief and excess. The theatre of queer love employs
politics, poetics and aesthetics in equal measure. Queering love translorms the
vocabulary with which we address our object, and the ensuing acts need not be
translated. The materiality of this argument is in its very terms. Queer love is not
economical and that is political. Love as a medium is part of an economy of
I78I/AUEER WORLDING, DEFIANT FLOURISHING
resistance, ecstatic resistance I would say, provoking questions of memory and
tactics. What does love want? Is it always discursive or sometimes outside of
rational economies of getting and giving?
Emily Roysdon, retitled extract from the roundtable discussion 'NoW Then and Love: Questions of
Agency in Contemporary Practice' (2006), in Juli Carson, ed., Exil des Imagíndren (Vienna: Cenerali
.l
Foundation, 2007) 60-61.
Shcrron Hcyes
Revçlutiorxüry Love: I Am Vour lÂIorst Feur, I A"m Your Best
Hnenny/12008
My dear love¡
I know you will be angry at me lor speaking to you like this in public but you
lelt me with no other choice. I called your phone but your voicemail is full. I tried
to reach you by email but got an automated reply. I still have your mother's
number from when you were visiting her last summer but when I called she said
she didn't know who I was. This morning I tried to get into the convention to talk
to you but I don't have a pass and there are police and party officials four lines
thick down there. It's not like the old days, when things were loose and you could
flirt or lie your way in. I'm not quite sure what you're all so afraid of. What's with
all the armour? Are things really that bad?
When I couldn't make it in, I waited outside hoping to find you in the crowd
of people lined up to get in. I know that you were there. I lelt certain that you
passed me but I didn't see you. You are indistinguishable from alI the others - the
delegates, the media, the police, those smartly dressed young volunteers. I can't
find you anywhere in this mess.
Did you see me?
Maybe not.
I'm standing on the Capitol Grounds, on the green rectangle just below Martin
Luther I(ingJr. Blvd.
You must admit, my love, we've had a terrible relationship. You kiss me long
and hard but you never loved me. I tried to tell myself I would get used to it. That
comforting old myth about the body's ability to adjust is just pure fiction. If that
were the case, after all these years, I should take to hatred the way a duck takes
to water. But instead I've suffered terribly.
Hayes//Revolutioncry Love// I 79
Love as a Hollow: Merleau-Ponty’s Promise
of Queer Love
MEGAN M. BURKE

This article argues that Maurice Merleau-Ponty advances a queer notion of love. In particu-
lar, I argue that his notion of love as an institution, as a hollow fueled by the imaginary
dimension of existence, shows that love unhinges petrified ideals of gender. I suggest that the
crucial insight to be found in Merleau-Ponty’s account of love is that love is a lived openness
that invites us to seek out new ways of being.

The theme of love plays a central role in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s lectures on insti-
tution and passivity (Merleau-Ponty 2010). In contrast to both Jean Paul Sartre and
Marcel Proust, Merleau-Ponty seeks to establish the reality of love, though a reality
that is deeply bound to an imaginary dimension.1 This understanding of reality res-
onates with his claims in “Eye and Mind” where we learn that reality is intertwined
with rather than opposed to the imaginary, which means that existence is always
instituted through “an imaginary texture of the real” (Merleau-Ponty 1993, 126).2
Accordingly, Merleau-Ponty affirms the reality of love, but only and always through
its imaginary dimension. Acknowledging real love to be imaginary is, however, a
development in his thinking on love when read in relation to his distinction between
false love and true love in Phenomenology of Perception. In this text, Merleau-Ponty
suggests true love is realized through authentic emotions, whereas false love is an
inauthentic experience that is infected by the dominant values of one’s situation. But
in Institution and Passivity, he claims true love to be instituted through an imaginary
dimension, making love not so much real, but “imaginareal” (Dufourcq 2015, 47).
We learn here that love is a quest with no end, or a continual series of “questions
and answers” actualized by imagination (Merleau-Ponty 2010, 39). It is an institution
that creates an opening out of which a creative existence springs.
Interestingly, in “The Woman in Love” chapter in The Second Sex, Simone de
Beauvoir also takes up a consideration of love’s relation to the imaginary domain,
suggesting that women’s subordination is created and maintained through

Hypatia vol. 32, no. 1 (Winter 2017) © by Hypatia, Inc.

62 Hypatia

splitting of existence, such that there is no certainty as to what love will become. So
Merleau-Ponty’s affirmation of love relies less on its guarantee than on the inevitabil-
ity that habit does not always succeed. Hence we are not left to despair the ambigu-
ity and opacity of love. The capacity of the imaginary to transform affirms the
institution of love as an imagining that can rescue imagination from habit.12 The
splitting open of the imaginary, an opening that is love itself, is what allows love to
entice and inspire new situations. Merleau-Ponty thus persuades us to see that love’s
great promise is that it arouses possibility. Although this does not resolve the haunt-
ing nightmare of false love or normatively gendered love, it does promise the possibil-
ity of weaving new experiences that are, in reality, love. For Merleau-Ponty, then,
love is not that which we can fully and lucidly grasp or perceive, but it is the possi-
bility that exists when the imaginary is robust. This possibility would still be phantas-
matic insofar as it is anonymous, but rather than a frightening redundancy, it would
be an ingenious realization.
If we bring ourselves back to Beauvoir’s account we might understand “the woman
in love” and inauthentic love to be a product of an impoverished imaginary.
From this perspective, the problem with inauthentic love is that it is determined
by dominant values and imagery of gender. Although inauthentic love creates a
world for “the woman in love,” this is, as Beauvoir emphasizes, not an opening up of
the world, but a foreclosure of the world and existence. But, importantly, from Mer-
leau-Ponty’s account we know that this is not really love after all. From his perspec-
tive, love is only and always a hollow or opening in us. Thus, authentic love would
be a product of the institution of love, of a transformation in the imaginary field.
This would suspend the influx of gendered ideals or the institution of habit. In turn,
the institution of love would necessitate, through its very rich imaginary, a creative
variation of gender within love.13 Whereas Beauvoir underscores the constraints on
authentic love, Merleau-Ponty’s account impresses on us the rich possibility of the
reality of love as that which undoes the constraint of ideals of gender. It is this, in
particular, that makes the institution of love quite queer.

THE INSTITUTION OF LOVE AS A QUEER PROMISE

In “Love, A Queer Feeling,” Lauren Berlant argues that love is a site of transformation
that is remarkably queer. She writes, “Love approximates a space to which people
return, becoming as different as they can be from themselves without being traumati-
cally shattered; it is a scene of optimism for change” (Berlant 2001, 448). Berlant con-
trasts this transformative space opened up by love to the absorption of love by
normativity, an absorption that turns love into repetitions of normality or convention
that preclude change.14 For Berlant, the queerness of love is that it is a placeholder, a
relational space to turn to, which disrupts intimate conventions or what she more
explicitly calls “a comforting intelligibility of conventional form” (448).
This sense of queerness resonates with the queer aesthetic advanced by Jos!e Este-
ban Mu~ noz. For Mu~ noz, queerness is “the rejection of normal love that keeps a
 Megan M. Burke 63

repressive social order in place” (Mu~ noz 2009, 134). Although he does not explicitly
thematize love, Mu~ noz sees queerness to be a desiring that is contrary to conven-
tional love.15 Queerness is, then, some other kind of love. It “is more than just sexu-
ality” (135). And though it can envelop “gay and lesbian sexualities,” it is, for
Mu~ noz, more an embrace of “experimental modes of love, sex, and relationality”
(136).16 Thus queerness is about how one engages, not necessarily whom one engages.
This rejection, or what Mu~ noz calls a great refusal, is an aesthetic dimension that,
similar to Berlant, allows us entry into a new space. It is a style of refusal to allow
“for new horizons and a vastness of potentiality” that points toward a future that is
not yet and may never be reached (Mu~ noz 2009, 141).
In many ways, Merleau-Ponty’s account of the institution of love resonates with
the ethos of nonnormativity and the disruption of amorous conventions forwarded by
Berlant and Mu~ noz. If the institution of love is an opening of the closure generated
by habit or the nightmarish side of the imaginary, then love is, for Merleau-Ponty, a
disruption of convention. More specifically, the institution of love is, by necessity, a
rejection of situational values. Insofar as love is an indeterminate opening, an endless
creativity, it cannot be realized through pre-established norms or narratives of gender,
sexuality, and pleasure. From this perspective, we can understand the institution of
love to be a rather queer event.
However, Merleau-Ponty’s account of love also offers a different way to think
about queer love. Whereas Berlant emphasizes love as a space for realizing queerness
and Mu~ noz sees queerness as a refusal of normal love, we learn from Merleau-Ponty
that the institution of love is a lived experience of openness and indeterminacy. It is
not so much a refusal or placeholder, but precisely that which maintains existence as
an open question. Although there is not a guarantee of love—indeed there is an
inherent instability in its possibility—what the institution of love promises is the flex-
ibility of one’s reality, of one’s existence, an institution and arousal of new variations.
This promise, however, does not make love impossible, although it does, as Merleau-
Ponty shows, make love a quest.
The value of this institution is that it is a lived pursuit, a lived opening. It is not a
utopian future (Mu~ noz 2009) or an optimistic political project (Berlant 2001), but is,
instead, that which can and does take shape in and through the living, bodily sub-
ject. Although its reality is opaque, the institution of love is an opening up of a
future that envelops lovers in their concreteness. As Ahmed underscores in her queer
account of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, when we focus on lived experience it is
possible to see how embodied existence becomes oriented or disoriented. In fact, that
we can see how bodies become disoriented in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology is
what leads Ahmed to claim that it is, in fact, queer. For her, its queerness is most
explicitly disclosed in his account of embodied existence or the living body. His writ-
ing shows that “bodies are already rather queer” insofar as they are always touched
and touching in ways that can throw them out of line or propel them into disorienta-
tion (Ahmed 2006, 106).17 But, the institution of love suggests that this disorienta-
tion is actually a deep opening that allows the instability of existence, what Ahmed
calls disorientation, to be lived. Indeed, the opening itself might be the means to
64 Hypatia

disorientation. In this way, the institution of love is a way in which existence is

nourished by abundance and in turn becomes an indeterminate quest, rather than a
fulfillment of convention.
Merleau-Ponty himself never understands the institution of love as queer. Still if
by queerness, following Berlant and Mu~ noz, we mean that which refuses established
orders and seeks new horizons, then Merleau-Ponty’s account of the institution of
love can be understood as a queer institution. We can, in fact, refer back to the read-
ing of “the woman in love” to underscore the way in which nonnormative genders
and sexualities are not only instituted through love, but also crucial to love’s institu-
tion. That is, Merleau-Ponty convinces us to see that what is normal or habitual is
precisely that which seals up the imaginary field necessary for love. This advances a
notion of queer as an expansive openness that suspends the route to normalcy. From
this perspective, the impetus of queer love insists on an indeterminacy and flexibility
of lovers. Inasmuch as it requires a rejection of habit, conventions of gender and sex-
uality must elide those who love and how they do so. As Beauvoir shows us, ideals
and expectations of gender are like a suture to the imagination such that if love is to
be lived, it must be torn apart.
Consequently, an open imaginary field is central to all love, which is by its nature
queer. If love is instituted only through a breaking apart of the habitual, which is
simultaneously a fecund opening, the imaginary field that institutes existence must be
robust. Because Merleau-Ponty understands existence to be immersed in the imagi-
nary, the hollow of love is a way to live inventive, though challenging lives. The
institution of love destabilizes our existence, puts the normal out of play, providing
opportunity to create new styles of existence, but insofar as it does this, it demands
us to build, invent, and be comfortable with instability of the hollow that is love. It
requires that lovers not impose norms or ideals on one another and instead, it is an
invitation to always imagine different ways to engage. This suggests the institution of
love is not a queer feeling, but, perhaps more significantly, the institution of a queer
existence.
The queerness of our existence realized in love is, though, that which we cannot
readily perceive. If we recall the anonymous character of the imaginary, we are
reminded that love is not that which the personal “I” realizes, but that which flows
through existence. It is a generative undercurrent of what I perceive, a present-
absence that cannot be grasped, but nevertheless, it is the dynamic sensibility of my
concrete existence. Since this invisibility of imagination is invested with the power
to move us, we can be moved at any moment, and the meanings present at hand
may become obscured. That Merleau-Ponty demands us to see love as bound to this
power of the imagination is crucial. It means that it is in love that people become
what is least expected of them.
Ultimately, that we can live this opening is the queer promise of Merleau-Ponty’s
institution of love. He demands us to take seriously that love offers us a way to unset-
tle the nightmares that seek to fix and pre-establish our realities. His account of love
encourages us to accept that our existence is flexible and inventive and that love is
one of the most effective ways to realize this. Although the institution of love is a
 Megan M. Burke 65

vulnerable endeavor, it is clear that Merleau-Ponty does not deny its possibility. In
fact, it is the very instability of love that enlivens and opens the abundant variations
that come within every situation. His affirmation of love as a creative force is an
invitation to acknowledge that love nourishes the flexibility of our existence that
proves not to be terrifying, but is precisely what offers us a way to create or queer,
rather than conform.

NOTES

1. Annabelle Dufourcq provides an insightful discussion of how Merleau-Ponty’s

account of love challenges Sartre’s account and confronts, but is also inspired by, Proust’s
(Dufourcq 2005).
2. I consider this notion of the imaginary in more detail later on in the article.
3. The word queer is complicated and its meaning debatable. It can be described as
sexual activism, a response to mainstream gay and lesbian politics, an identity, a site of
collective contestation, theory, or commentary and critique of heteronormativity (Butler
1993; Sedgwick 1993; Berlant and Warner 1995; Jagose 1996; Cohen 1997; Turner 2000).
Thus, it is important to specify that I am using queer love to mean a rejection and disrup-
tion of heteronormative love that may be heterosexual or lesbian, gay, or bisexual love
that mimics heteronormative conventions. This use is one important but not exhaustive
sense of the word queer, which resonates with other uses of queer (Sedgwick 1993; Ahmed
2006; Mu~ noz 2009). I take up this discussion more thoroughly in the final section. It is
also important to note that I focus more explicitly on conventions of (hetero) genders,
which, as Butler makes clear, are formative to sexuality (Butler 1997). (To me, it also
seems that Beauvoir suggests something quite similar.)
4. Lauren Berlant suggests that love has not been taken seriously “as an analytic con-
cept and project for elaboration” in queer theory (Berlant 2001, 437). In some ways, I
agree with her. Although one can find commentary on love in queer theory, it is less
explicit that love is ever thematized as a queer resource itself.
5. My intent, however, is not to create a strict divide between phenomenology and
these other approaches. In fact, there are important dialogues to be had between them
and in ways relevant to this article. Edward Casey’s “The Unconscious Mind and the
Prereflective Body” is a prime example of the overlaps between Merleau-Ponty and Freu-
dian psychoanalysis in relation to the imaginary domain and corporeality (Casey 1999).
But, at the same time, Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the lived dimension of the imaginary
and the imaginary character of corporeality are important and unique in their own right,
which will be explored in this article. Importantly, even Casey recognizes this in one of
his earlier texts when he says, “Even the psychoanalysis of Freud, for all of its brilliant
insight into phantasy, tends to equate imagining with daydreaming” (Casey 1974, 4).
6. Beauvoir’s account of feminine existence in The Second Sex is not universalizable.
Beauvoir scholars and critics have, importantly, pointed out that Beauvoir’s description of
women is a particular description of white, bourgeois, heterosexual women. Her account
of love is thus also situated within this context. I am not, however, turning to Beauvoir to
give the account of gendered love, but as an important and relevant account of the
66 Hypatia

insidious ways in which love, heterosexuality, and gender are entangled. For an insightful
piece on the relevance of Beauvoir’s account, see Mann 2009.
7. In fact, Merleau-Ponty takes up Beauvoir’s analysis of “the phenomenon of the
‘battle of the sexes’” in regard to love (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 103). In The Primacy of
Perception he points out that the social dichotomization of men and women and the
individual uptake of “established myths as well as certain tendencies of their own
physiological constitutions” most often results in “a sort of tacit agreement” where
“men and women . . . live side by side, in a love that is hate, a hate that is love”
(104). It is thus all the more interesting to consider what Merleau-Ponty’s account of
true love does to the “battle of the sexes,” especially since this battle produces hate
and not love.
8. The placement of the discussion of false love and true love in “The Cogito” chap-
ter makes this compromise all the more necessary to think through.
9. As generative of the personal “I,” anonymity might very well be habitual too.
Merleau-Ponty makes this explicit when he accounts for “two distinct layers” of the body
as “the habitual body and . . . the actual body” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 84). However, as
Al-Saji points out, the anonymous is also excessive, our senses are always dynamic such
that the world can flow through me in ways contrary to habit.
10. This distinction between the institution of love and the institution of habit
might allow us to reconsider the distinction between false love and true love found in
Phenomenology of Perception. More specifically, it seems quite plausible that the “situational
values” generative of false love are precisely the institution of habit.
11. I borrow this language of the nightmare from Dufourcq, who contrasts it to the
other, creative and magical, side of the imaginary domain (Dufourcq 2014). Given the
effects of inauthentic love on a woman’s existence, it seems appropriate to understand it
as a nightmare.
12. In fact Merleau-Ponty claims “imagination can save imagination”: “Les grecs ont
cr!e!e une raison qui sait qu’en n’!etant qu’elle-m^eme elle ne serait pas la raison, qui laisse parler
tout le reste de l’homme, qui consent m^eme au mythe, "a condition qu’il soit l’imagination sauvant
de l’imagination” (Merleau-Ponty 2000, 204, translation mine).
13. Similarly, we might consider the centrality of freedom in Beauvoir’s authentic
love to be necessary to Merleau-Ponty’s account of the institution of love. Given that true
love is never a possession of the lover, mutual recognition of freedom seems pertinent to
sustaining such dispossession.
14. In this piece, Berlant never specifies her concern with normativity or convention-
ality as heteronormativity, but she does contrast nonheteronormative accounts of desire to
normativity. Her other work, however, makes more explicit that her understanding of nor-
mativity presumes heteronormativity. For instance, she, along with Michael Warner,
accounts for heteronormativity as the normal social institution of sexuality (Berlant and
Warner 1998).
15. Love, though, does play a central role in his queer aesthetic. The great refusal
that characterizes the aesthetic is based on the loves lived by Eros and Narcissus in Her-
bert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization.
16. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick captures a similar notion of queer in her essay “Queer
and Now” (Sedgwick 1993). For Sedgwick, queer is a relationality and practices that do
 Megan M. Burke 67

not neatly line up with given conventions of sexuality and gender or that fail to move in
expected directions.
17. For Ahmed, Merleau-Ponty shows that embodied existence has a propensity
toward being thrown into disorientation, which she understands as a queer deviation from
compulsory heterosexuality.

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———. 1998. Sex in public. Critical Inquiry 24 (2): 547–66.
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———. 1997. The psychic life of power. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
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———. 1999. The unconscious mind and the prereflective body. In Merleau-Ponty, interior-
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Cohen, Cathy. 1997. Punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens: The radical potential of
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De Lauretis, Teresa. 1994. The practice of love: Lesbian sexuality and perverse desire. Bloom-
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———. 2001. Beyond romance. Albany: State University of New York Press.
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———. 2014. The ontological imaginary: Dehiscence, sorcery, and creativity in Merleau-
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———. 2015. The fundamental imaginary dimension of the real in Merleau-Ponty’s philos-
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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964. The primacy of perception. Trans. J. M. Edie. Evanston, Ill.:
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———. 1968. The visible and the invisible. Trans. A. Lingis. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern
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 Pulse
Juana María Rodríguez

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 24, Number 1, January
2018, pp. 51-53 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/686233

Access provided by University of Tasmania Library (18 Mar 2018 06:31 GMT)
 GLQ FORUM / AFTEREFFECTS 51

Note

I wish to thank the following dance partners for creating this list with me: Maylei
Blackwell, Ricardo Abreu Bracho, Cindy Cruz, Manuel Cuellar, Micaela Diaz-
Sanchez, Patricia Espinoza Artiles, Laura Gutierrez, Xandra Ibarra, Lawrence La
Fountain-Stokes, Lourdes Mártinez-Echazábal, Maricella Infante, Danny Mendez,
Ivan Ramos, Ramon Rivera-Servera, Juana María Rodríguez, Jennifer Tyburczy.

DOI 10.1215/10642684-4254486

PULSE

Juana María Rodríguez

Dancing
In the Pulse
In the beat of tomorrow pa-túm pa-túm pa-túm And then
Shot down, erased, disappeared Akyra, Alejandro, Amanda, y Ángel

Disappeared from the future Like the immigrant sent packing

Anthony and Antonio were sent back to where they came from Deported to the
dark

Brenda, Christopher, and Cory tried to hide Darryl, Deonka, and Eddie tried to
be small Edward, Enrique, and Eric tried to go unnoticed
They tried to disappear as the bullets pounded out a bachata beat Against the
flesh of the unlucky

They sought cover

Like the homeless under the bridge They slipped out
Like the ‘chachas when la chota hits the block They ducked down
Like the guy in the back of someone else’s truck (Is it over? Are we safe?)
52 GLQ: A JOURNAL OF LESBIAN AND GAY STUDIES

Like the sisters who do the brothers when no one is looking They kept it on the
down low
Hiding behind fake social security numbers and government names Hiding from
the NYPD T-shirt
La migra
El chisme de radio bemba
Running away from la PROMESA del desencanto

They dared to reach

For names and digits floating in the air For the memory of another last night
For other fugitives seeking funky communion In the Pulse

Frank, Franky, Geraldo, out and proud

Gilberto, Jason, Javier, and Jean, slaying for the masses

Jean Carlos, Jerald, Joel, and Jonathan

Queer Saturday night splendor in black and brown velvet Boricuas bestiales
No more

Mis tocayos Juan, Juan, y Juan,

Suplicandole a Cachita con ofrendas de miel y chavos prietos Joining the round-
the-block, round-the-clock conga line
Of desaparecidos

From Papa Doc to Pinochet We know disappeared

We feel the vanished 43 Gone and gone
And living on In the Pulse
In the pa-túm pa-túm pa-túm of rising heat and rising rents (Visibility is a trap)

Disappeared
Like the refugee at the border Out of sight
Like the detainee at Guantánamo
Evicted, convicted, and priced out of town
Locked away in the state-soaked stench of a solitary elsewhere of olvido (do you
see us now?)

Kimberly, Leroy y los cuatro Luises bailando reggaeton en el otro lado A day
without an immigrant
 GLQ FORUM / AFTEREFFECTS 53

Becomes a long, long day without Martín and Mercedes On strike forever, carried
to the beat of an elsewhere

(Miguel Ángel and Óscar thank you for all the teddy bears and flowers Left in
their name
At the weekly altars of heartbreak and tragedy
Healthcare, gun control, and housing would also be welcome And a public
bathroom

Peter, Paul, and Simon like the Facebook posts Rainbow love for Orlando
Pretty is as pretty does
Offering the wounded your disease-free blood
But our ugly hurts demand more than cluttered shrines)

Rodolfo Ayala-Ayala, allá para siempre, Ojalá O Allah, we pray together with
Omar
Together now in the black warmth of our forever belonging

And from the spaces where we hide

We say their names to beat back the fear In the shadows
We wait to hold another breath

And we remember Shane, Stanley, and Tevin Like we remember Tupac and
Selena Because ghosts are powerful and real
And we remember Xavier and Yilmary
Like we remember Venus Xtravaganza and Gwen Araujo Because the streets are
murderous for our kind

And we remember the names that we don’t yet know Because the beat goes on
And on and on

But the night is warm and the DJ is lit

pa-túm pa-túm pa-túm
So we mingle with the disappeared To plot and plan our tomorrows

We dance Glowing and woke In the naked heat

Of another Latin Night without you
DOI 10.1215/10642684-4254495
tiny eye
by Ainslie Templeton

(”ó)

quivering nose stem

I’ve read this four times already today
made my own meal in the gaps between
research means stepping out from the constitutive
community
into a placed mind which is not one
stupid white girl imagery

you hear two young queers talking loudly on the bus

about sex work and mental health over nonnas in the
access seat
and you see all the repositories
what are you holding now if you’re not holding that
positionality?
anon harlot on PT with a bilum full of notebooks
nubile room that airs been gasped out of

black dress gifted

but leslie’s at the christchurch marriott
with a gaggle of vodka bottles
walking through the marketplace city
and the habitus has changed so much for you
wonder what it is as you take off your sweater and he
stutters
go into the gallery now and it feels reaching
tiny eye

piracy
by Ainslie Templeton

saggy little fruit i was never sposed

to eat
zoom in makes it denatured, zoom out makes it
nothing
just at that right breeze…

soo sick of dry droolers… only women and faggots

slobber in public.. cos were integrated xx … but hir i
am on this muddy river knowing i’m somebody..

-i’m gonna call my kid “Renege”

- you’re sterile, Carol

I read transmisog books looking for the sacred sign of

the monstir. my editor doesn’t like it but I have to know..

jade plants have no odour

and that isn’t spelled Proud

my older sister dwarfed as i reach across her model

friend’s hot lap
like i don’t even know who she is anymore looking
down my honky nipples

it’s pretty funny

Happiness and Queer Politics 1

Sara Ahmed

“You might have a good story there,” Dick said, “but … you cannot make homosexuality
attractive. No happy ending…” In other words, my heroine has to decide she’s not really
queer”… “That’s it. And the one she’s involved with is sick or crazy.” —Vin Packer

In this exchange Vin Packer, author of the first best selling lesbian pulp novel Spring Fire
first published in 1952, comes to an agreement with her publisher. The novel will be
published, but only on condition that it does not have a happy ending, as such an ending
would “make homosexuality attractive.” 2 Queer fiction in this period could not give
happiness to its characters as queers; such a gift would be readable as making queers
appear “good”: as the “promotion” of the social value of queer lives; or an attempt to
influence readers to become queer.

Somewhat ironically, then, the unhappy ending becomes a political gift: it provides a
means through which queer fiction could be published. If the unhappy ending was an
effect of censorship, it also provided a means for overcoming censorship. So although
Packer expresses regret for the compromise of its ending in her introduction to the new
issue of Spring Fire published in 2004, she also suggests that while it “may have satisfied
the post office inspections, the homosexual audience would not have believed it for a
minute. But they also wouldn’t care that much, because more important was the fact there
was a new book about us.” 3 The unhappy ending satisfies the censors whilst also enabling
the gay and lesbian audience to be satisfied; we are not obliged to “believe” in the unhappy
ending by taking the ending literally, as “evidence” that lesbians and gays must turn
straight, die or go mad. What mattered was the existence of “a new book about us.”

We can see that reading unhappy endings in queer archives is a complicated matter. A
literal reading suggests that the very distinction between happy and unhappy endings
“works” to secure a moral distinction between good and bad lives. When we read this
unhappy queer archive (which is not the only queer archive) we must resist this literalism,
which means an active disbelief in the necessary alignment of the happy with the good, or
even in the moral transparency of the good itself. Rather than reading unhappy endings as
a sign of the withholding of a moral approval for queer lives, we would consider how
unhappiness circulates within and around this archive, and what it allows us to do.

My aim in this essay is to consider unhappy queers as a crucial aspect of queer genealogy.
As Heather Love has argued “We need a genealogy of queer affect that does not overlook
the negative, shameful and difficult feelings that have been so central to queer existence in
the last century.” 4 Scholars such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Elspeth Probyn and Sally
Munt have offered us powerful defenses of the potentialities of shame for queer politics. 5 I
will consider what it might mean to affirm unhappiness, or at least not to overlook it. We
can explore how queer literatures locate and attribute unhappiness and how, in doing so,
they offer us an alternative approach to happiness as a positive, but perhaps still rather
difficult, feeling. 6
world picture 3

condensed in the very intangibility of an atmosphere, or in the tangibility of the bodies

that seem always to “get in the way” of the happiness of others.

Making Others Happy

Robert Heinlin’s definition of love “is a condition in which the happiness of another is 
essential to your own”. 22  It is perhaps a truism that to love another is to want their
happiness. Whether or not we agree with this truth, we can learn from its status as truth.
I want to turn to a text from the eighteenth century, Rousseau’s Émile, first published in
1762, which was crucial for how it re-defined education and for the role it gave to
happiness. The story is told in the first person, by a narrator whose duty is to instruct a
young orphan Émile, in order that he can take up his place in the world. Rousseau also
offers a model not only of what a good education would do for his Émile, but also for
Émile’s would-be wife, Sophy, whom he introduces in the fifth book. Sophie must become
a good woman. As Rousseau describes, the good woman:

loves virtue because there is nothing fairer in itself. She loves it because it is a
woman’s glory and because a virtuous woman is little lower than the angels; she
loves virtue as the only road to real happiness, because she sees nothing but poverty,
neglect, unhappiness, shame and disgrace in the life of the bad woman; she loves
virtue because it is dear to her revered father, and to her tender and worthy mother;
they are not content to be happy in their own virtue, they desire hers; and she finds
her chief happiness in the hope of just making them happy! 23

The complexity of this statement should not be underestimated. She loves virtue as it is
the road to happiness; unhappiness and disgrace follow from being bad. The good woman
loves what is good because what is good is what is loved by her parents. The parents
desire not only what is good; they desire their daughter to be good. The daughter desires
to be good to give them what they desire. For her to be happy, she must be good, as being
good is what makes them happy, and she can only be happy if they are happy.

It might seem that what we can call “conditional happiness,” when one person’s happiness
is made conditional on another person’s, involves a form of generosity: a refusal to have a
share in a happiness that cannot be shared. And yet the terms of conditionality are
unequal. If certain people come first—we might say those who are already in place (such
as parents, hosts or citizens)—then their happiness comes first. For those who are
positioned as coming after, happiness means following somebody else’s goods.

I suggested earlier that we might share a social bond if the same objects make us happy. I
am now arguing that happiness itself can become the shared object. Or to be more
precise, if one person’s happiness comes first, then their happiness becomes a shared object.
Max Scheler’s differentiation between communities of feeling and fellow-feeling might
help explain the significance of this argument. In communities of feeling, we share
feelings because we share the same object of feeling. Fellow-feeling would be when I feel
sorrow about your grief although I do not share your object of grief: “all fellow-feeling
involves intentional reference of the feeling of joy or sorrow to the other person’s
experience.” 24 I would speculate that in everyday life these different forms of shared

6
world picture 3

feeling can be confused because the object of feeling is sometimes but not always exterior
to the feeling that is shared.

Say I am happy about your happiness. Your happiness is with x. If I share x, then your
happiness and my happiness is not only shared, but can accumulate through being given
out and returned. Or I can simply disregard x: if my happiness is directed “just” toward
your happiness, and you are happy about x, the exteriority of x can disappear or cease to
matter (although it can reappear). In cases where I am also affected by x, and I do not
share your happiness with x, I might become uneasy and ambivalent: I am made happy by
your happiness but I am not made happy by what makes you happy. The exteriority of x would
then announce itself as a point of crisis. I might take up what makes you happy as what
makes me happy, which may involve compromising my own idea of happiness (so I will go
along with x in order to make you happy even if x does not “really” make me happy). In
order to preserve the happiness of all, we might even conceal from ourselves our
unhappiness with x, or try and persuade ourselves that x matters less than the happiness
of the other who is made happy by x. 25

We have a hint of the rather uneasy dynamics of conditional happiness in Émile. For
Sophy wanting to make her parents happy commits her in a certain direction, regardless
of what she might or might not want. If she can only be happy if they are happy then she
must do what makes them happy. In one episode, the father speaks to the daughter about
becoming a woman: “you are a big girl now, Sophy, you will soon be a woman. We want
you to be happy, for our sakes as well as yours, for our happiness depends on yours. A
good girl finds her own happiness in the happiness of a good man.” 26 For the daughter
not to go along with the parent’s desire for marriage would be not only to cause her
parents unhappiness, but would threaten the very reproduction of social form. The
daughter has a duty to reproduce the form of the family, which means taking up the cause of
parental happiness as her own.

We learn from reading books such as Émile how much happiness is used as a technology
or instrument, which allows the re-orientation of individual desire towards a common
good. We also learn from reading such books how happiness is not simply instrumental,
but works as an idea or aspiration within everyday life, shaping the very terms in which
individuals share their world with others. We do things when we speak of happiness,
when we put happiness into words.

Let’s take the statement: I am happy if you are. Such a statement can be attributed, as a way
of sharing an evaluation of an object. I could be saying I am happy about something if you
are happy about something. The statement, though, does not require an object to mediate
between the “I” and the “you”; the “you” can be the object, can be what my happiness is
dependent upon. I will only be happy if you are. To say I will be happy only if you are happy
means that I will be unhappy if you are unhappy. Your unhappiness would make me unhappy.
Given this, you might be obliged to conceal your unhappiness to preserve my happiness:
You must be happy for me.

I am not saying that such speech acts always translate in quite this way. But we can
learn from how the desire for the happiness of others can be the point at which they are
bound to be happy for us. If to love another is to want their happiness, then love might

7
world picture 3

The recognition of queers can be narrated as the hope or promise of becoming acceptable,
where in being acceptable you must become acceptable to a world that has already decided
what is acceptable. Recognition becomes a gift given from the straight world to queers,
which conceals long histories of queer labor and struggle, 30 the life worlds generated by
queer activism, which has created a “place at the table” in the hope that the table won’t
keep its place. It is as if such recognition is a form of straight hospitality, which in turn
positions happy queers as guests in other people’s homes, reliant on their continuing good
will. In such a world you are asked to be grateful for the bits and pieces that you are
given. To be a guest is to experience a moral obligation to be on “your best behavior” such
that to refuse to fulfill this obligation would be to threaten your right to co-existence. The
happy queer, the one who has good manners, who is seated at the table in the right way,
might be a strategic form of occupying an uncivil world. But strategic occupations can
keep things in place. Or we can keep in place by the effort of an occupation. I think we
know this.

There are of course good reasons for telling stories about queer happiness, in response
and as a response to the presumption that a queer life is necessarily and inevitably an
unhappy life. 31 We just have to hear the violence of Michael’s tragic comment, “show me a
happy homosexual and I’ll show you a gay corpse” from Matt Crowley’s 1968 play, “The
Boys in the Band” to be reminded of these reasons. 32 And yet, at the same time, and
perhaps even for the same reasons, we can see why telling stories about queer
unhappiness might matter. Being attributed as the cause of unhappiness has unhappy
effects. It might be the pain of not being recognized. It might be the conditions of
recognition. It might even be the work required to counter the perception of your life as
unhappy: the very pressure to be happy in order to show that you are not unhappy can
create unhappiness, to be sure.

Unhappiness and Deviation

Happiness scripts are powerful even when we fail or refuse to follow them, when our
desires deviate from their straight lines. In this way, the scripts speak a certain truth:
deviation can involve unhappiness. The “whole world” it might seem depends on your
being directed in the right way, towards the right kind of things. The unhappiness of the
deviant has a powerful function as a perverse promise (if you do this, you will get that!), a
promise that simultaneously offers a threat (so don’t do that!). To deviate is always to risk
a world even when you don’t lose the world you risk. Queer histories are the histories of
those who are willing to risk the consequences of deviation.

The history of the word “unhappy” teaches us about the unhappiness of the history of
happiness. In its earliest uses, unhappy meant “causing misfortune or trouble.” Only later,
did it come to mean “miserable in lot or circumstances” or “wretched in mind.” 33 We can
learn from the swiftness of the translation between being attributed as the cause of
unhappiness and being described as unhappy. We must learn.

The word “wretched” also has a suggestive genealogy, coming from wretch, referring to a
stranger, exile, or banished person. The wretch is not only the one driven out of their
native country, but is also defined as one who is “sunk in deep distress, sorrow,
misfortune, or poverty,” “a miserable, unhappy, or unfortunate person,” “a poor or hapless

10
world picture 3

not mean unhappiness becomes our political cause. In refusing to be constrained by

happiness, we can open up other ways of being, of being perhaps.

The word “perhaps” shares its “hap” with happiness. We can get from the “perhaps” to the
wretch if we deviate at a certain point. One definition of the wretch is a “poor and hapless
being.” I would say those who enter the history of happiness as wretches might be hapful
rather than hapless. To deviate from the paths of happiness is to refuse to inherit the
elimination of the hap. Affect aliens, those who are alienated by happiness, can thus be
creative: not only do we want the wrong things, not only do we embrace possibilities that
we are asked to give up, but we can create life worlds around these wants. Whilst we
might insist on the freedom to be unhappy, we would not leave happiness behind us.
Maybe it will be up to queers to put the hap back into happiness.

Sara Ahmed is Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of
London. Her books include Differences that Matter: Feminist Theory and Postmodernism
(Cambridge University Press, 1998); Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in
Postcoloniality (Routledge, 2000); The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Routledge, 2004);
Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects and Others (Duke University Press. 2006);
and The Promise of Happiness (Duke University Press, forthcoming). She is currently working
on a collection of essays on diversity and racism and has recently begun research for a new book
provisionally entitled Willful Subjects: The Psychic Life of Social Dissent.

Notes

1 This paper is drawn from my forthcoming book The Promise of Happiness (and in particular
from the chapter “Unhappy Queers” which includes a much wider archive of queer materials
than is represented here). This book is due to be published by Duke University Press in
2010. Thanks to Duke for permission to include this paper in World Picture.
2 Vin Packer, Spring Fire (San Francisco. Cleis Press, 2004), vi.
3 Ibid., vii.
4 Heather Love, Feeling Backward: The Politics of Loss in Queer History (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 2007), 127.

5 Evelyn Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Performativity, Pedagogy (Durham:

Duke University Press, 2003), Elspeth Probyn, Blush: Faces of Shame (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2005), Sally Munt, Queer Attachments: The Cultural
Politics of Shame (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).
6 This is not to reduce happiness to good feeling. The association between happiness with

good feeling is a modern one, as Darrin McMahon shows us in his monumental history of
happiness [Darrin M McMahon, Happiness: A History (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press,
2005)]. We have inherited this association such that it is hard to think about happiness
without thinking about feeling. Happiness has also been associated with virtue and the
value of flourishing: with the good life. My interest is in how happiness involves an affective
as well as moral economy: I will thus explore the relationship between feeling good and
other kinds of goods, or how feelings participate in making some things and not others
good.

16
Love cannot cause pain; attachments cause pain. When the attachments that we create in our minds break, we
feel their rupture deeply, how deeply depends on how much we identify with the image that we have created. An
image or an attachment is a figure we create in our minds of our own idea of how something is, how things should
be, or how we want things to be with a particular person. Ultimately, attachments are when we want things to be a
certain way. When things happen contrary to these images that we hold dear in our minds we feel pain from these
attachments being stretched and broken.

Attachments are not a form of true love. Unconditional love, selfless love, a love without expectations is a higher
form of existence that creates no attachments or images, it is a state of profound egolessness. Expectactions and
judgements are attachments that the untrained mind repeatedly creates, causing more knots and burdens that
impede us from happiness. The typical human mind is eclipsed by the delusion of ego, the ego separates,
categorizes, and labels everything that it comes across, causing our own discontent and misunderstanding.

To live egolessly is a journey that requires much patience, it is truly a long road, but with training the mind can
become more accustomed to existing without creating as many images, attachments, and generally being less
inclined to making expectations and judgments. Through the releasing of these attachments the mind becomes
less burdened and is able to love more freely and live more happily. This is why so many sages say, if you want to
be free, if you want to be happy, one must learn to let go. The attachments we release allow space for wisdom and
unconditional love to blossom and flourish. One of the best ways I know of to train the mind and release attachments
is through meditation, what are some of the ways you go about releasing attachments? Much love to all beings.

Tags: attachment love growth spiritual chakra happiness meditation meditatepersonaldevelopment spiritscience
writers selflove loveyourself knowthyselffulfillment calm peace peaceful wordswithkings wordswithqueens
psychologyphilosophy transcendence existentialism angels chanting kundalini mindfulnessmindful spilledink

From: @yungpueblo

 Since at least the sixteenth century, individuals
who could in today’s terminology be referred to
as LGBTQ+ or queer have been creating their own
linguistic registers. The “closet,” for one, is a
linguistic formation that only dates back to the
mid-twentieth century, as we may be aware.

01/09
What is perhaps less known is how these
languages were produced in the context of the
secrecy that the proverbial closet provides, and
what parallels within that space can be drawn
with Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacity and
the right not to be understood. Furthermore,
Jonathan D. Katz’s study on John Cage’s tactic of
silence and passivity as a political stance
continues into an analysis of the role of camp
Anna T. performativity in the success or failure of getting

The Opacity of the (coded) message across.

After researching the coining of the
expression “coming out of the closet” and
Queer focusing on the ways language produces the
social space of the closet, I have shifted my focal

Languages point on how this linguistically formed locus also

generates language itself, which in turn produces
or reaffirms social space. Looking deeper into
the cultures that surround the closet (and I’m
referring to the closet as a production of
heteronormativity that is inscribed in social
space1 and which most of us are both inside and
outside of at the same time2), I started exploring
the constructions of the closet as a language-
generator itself.
These take the form of slangs (argots, or
cants), or dialects, falling under the wider
category of lavender linguistics, and they seem
to have existed in geographically and culturally
unrelated areas. They do not constitute
languages per se in the sense that they do not
have distinct grammar and syntax, although they
e-flux journal #60 — december 2014 Anna T.

do in some cases have a vocabulary extensive

enough to allow one to speak exclusively in them.
Although falling under the overlapping space of
slangs and argots, since these idioms seem to
The Opacity of Queer Languages

have specific geographic radiuses and are

produced and used by particular social groups,
they could perhaps also be described as
sociolects.3

(At Least) Eight Ways to Speak Queer

I already knew the Greek “Kaliarda” and the
British “Polari” from living in Greece and England
and associating with the local LGBT and queer
communities. After research to find out if the
phenomenon has been wider and appeared
elsewhere as well, I discovered the Brazilian
“Bajubá” or “Pajubá,” the Philippine
“Swardspeak,” the Indonesian “Bahasa Binan,”
the South African “IsiNgqumo” and “Gayl” or
“Gail,” and the Turkish “Lubunca.”4
The reasoning behind these creations is
constant and common: the production of safer

12.11.14 / 13:55:07 EST

12.11.14 / 13:55:07 EST
spaces of communication and contact between
members of marginalized minoritarian groups
who have traditionally been persecuted or faced
legal punishment, or the threat of medical
correction.
These communication codes allowed for an
03/09
easier exchange of information that to some
extent shielded group members from potential
aggressors: at the same time, these languages
did not render group members completely
invisible. It is exactly this position between
visibility and invisibility – which can perhaps be
described as opaqueness – that interests me in
relation to the particular political stance of
passivity. David Van Leer, an American scholar
who researched queer cultures in the US from
the 1920s to the 2000s, says that “often
minorities speak most volubly between the lines,
ironically reshaping dialogues the oppressor
thinks he controls or even finding new topics and
modes of speaking to which the oppressor
himself lacks access.”5
Language – being regulated by the state,
taught in educational institutions, and used to
discipline, inform, educate, or structurally
violate, among other uses – is frequently
subverted by minorities in an attempt to bypass
authority. In this case in particular the “new
topics” and “modes” Van Leer refers to are
perhaps illegal pleasures, embodied
performances, irony, and disguised (or not-so-
well-disguised) social critique.
While trying to stay safe and communicate,
individual subjects start forming a community
based on a common culture. In her essay “Qwir-
English Code-Mixing in Germany: Constructing a
Rainbow of Identities,” Heidi Minning argues that
“the resulting sociopsychological function is one
of constructing group membership and a sense
of the self as a participant in larger gay and
lesbian local and transnational cultures.”6
Lexicon
These slangs with vocabularies ranging from six
hundred words (as is the case of Polari) to more
than six thousand documented words (as in
Kaliarda) and different lifespans (four hundred
years and counting in the case of Lubunca, or
thirty years in the case of IsiNgqumo), constitute
mini-universes where their users freely circulate
and through which they are able to connect. They
do not only include terms to describe the
particular practices/interests of the groups
which might be dangerous to publicly describe in
a noncoded way. They also include words or
phrases to describe everyday household objects,
professions, toponyms, and activities. They are
patchworks of several other languages, including
etymologically untraceable neologisms.7
For instance, Polari consists of English,
12.11.14 / 13:55:07 EST
Italian, Yiddish, and Mediterranean Lingua
Franca (a composite itself),8 while Kaliarda is
made up of Greek, English, Italian, French,
Turkish, and Romani.9 Bajubá or Pajubá seems to
have its roots in Africa and is based on several
Bantu and Yoruba African languages outfitted
with Portuguese syntax.10 Swardspeak is a
mixture of Tagalog, English, Spanish, and
Japanese.11 Lubunca consists of Turkish,
Romani, French, Greek, English, Armenian,
Arabic, Italian, Bulgarian, Kurmanji, Russian, and
Spanish.12
The multicultural linguistic loans seem to
indicate a certain degree of mobility on the part
of the speakers, who seem to have come in
contact with foreigners beyond their immediate
border neighbors, perhaps through working the
seas, or through unsuccessful attempts to find
better employment options abroad, but also due
to dealing with sailors and seamen as sex-
workers themselves. And as Paul Baker says, we
shouldn’t throw out the possibility of the use of
foreign languages as a way of coming across as
more sophisticated and well-traveled.13
Much like the several spatiotemporal
paradoxes that surround the closet, the
languages that could be its product seem to
predate it in certain cases. Furthermore, who
speaks or spoke these languages long before the
emergence of any contemporary understanding
of homosexuality, the homosexual, and notions
such as trans* or queer becomes an even more
sensitive topic in light of queer modes of
communication.
Social Queetique
As I can only fully access Kaliarda and to a
certain extent Polari, one of the things I have
noticed is their lack of political correctness (or
any sense of self-censorship for that matter),
and the pejorative terms used for both those who
are socially looked down on by society (including
the speakers themselves) and their oppressors
alike.14 This seems to indicate a certain adoption
of the mores of the general population in
12.11.14 / 13:55:07 EST
addition to their own, no matter how translates as “faggville”/“sisterville”
contradictory the two may be.15 For instance, the (αδερφοχώρι); ÒMoutsemeniÓΜουτσεμένη),
( a
words for an effeminate homosexual or the word referring to the Virgin Mary as having been
receptive partner in penetrative sex are always naively tricked; and “smartasses’ gangbang”
pejorative, and the same cannot be said of the (φαεινο¹ αρτούζα),referring to a political party;
terms for the insertive partner. and the Acropolis being referred to as “tourist

05/09
The word “Kaliarda” (καλιαρντά) itself has trap” (τουριστόφακα).19 Such social critique is
only negative meanings: “mean, ugly, weird,” with not unique to queer slangs though; it is a
the verb “kaliardevo” (καλιαρντεύω) meaning to phenomenon common among subcultural
speak ill of someone.16 languages, as the same is true for hobo slang,
In addition, there are pejorative terms for spiv cant, magkika and so on. Paul Baker writes
other groups that seem to already be looked that in “‘anti-languages’ the social values of
down on by Greek society, and for whom there words and phrases tend to be more emphasized
already exist several offensive terms, like for the than in mainstream languages,” a phenomenon
out-of-towners, the obese, the old, and the non- termed “sociolinguistic coding orientation,”20
able-bodied. At the same time, there are plenty while Nicholas Kontovas points out that
of derogatory terms for legal, religious, and
political authorities. This points to the counter- the slang of marginal groups betrays an
cultural elements of the subculture that to some alternative sociolinguistic market, in which
extent could be the result of the constant friction the value of markers from the majority
with said authorities. market is neither intrinsically positive not
It seems that at least by allowing for a negative, but reassessed based on an
mocking of those seen as oppressors, or by alternative habitus which is particular to
placing themselves somewhere other than the the field in which that group interacts.21
lowest position in the social hierarchy, queers
can afford a moment of pleasure that derives Both Baker and Kontovas point to the
from their deviance itself and their organizing specificities of the social universes these
around it. languages produce, which much like the words
So beyond the importance of a safer space, themselves are borrowed, reappropriated, and
and the practicalities of communication between creatively adjusted to reflect the ever-changing
precariously living subjects, another element of needs and positions of the speakers.
these languages is the proximity they produce The overlapping of marginalized groups that
between the speakers, and most importantly the operate with those slangs offers an interesting
moments of humor and joy they allow for. For insight into their intersectionality. Circus
instance, small moments of pleasure among performers, sailors, prostitutes, and criminals,
fellow deviant subjects seem to be the case with for instance, also used Polari. Polari also
much of Kaliarda and the way it is used, which incorporates elements of Thieves’ Cant from the
sadly remains untranslatable. I can only guess seventeenth century and Hackney rhyming
e-flux journal #60 — december 2014 Anna T.

that this might well be the case for some of the slang.22
other languages as well. Similarly, Kaliarda – used primarily by
As Elizabeth Freeman suggests, we might (trans*) sex workers and “effeminate
be able to glimpse in our archives “historically homosexuals,” according to researcher Elias
The Opacity of Queer Languages

specific forms of pleasure” that have not been Petropoulos – is also spoken by actors. It has
institutionalized, and a deeper look at queer borrowed and loaned lemmata from magkika and
language can definitely provide a confirmation of rebetika, two different slang varieties used by
that.17 Sara Ahmed states: other Greek subcultures.23 Pajubá, apart from
being used by the LGBTQ and queer community,
To be happily queer might mean being is used by Candomblé practitioners.24Although
happy to be the cause of unhappiness (at all of the above categories are in one way or
least in the sense that one agrees to be the another marginal, perhaps illegal, with intense
cause of unhappiness, even if one is not minoritarian traits, and although socialization
made happy by causing unhappiness), as between them could explain this transcultural
well as to be happy with where we get to if permeation of terms, it definitely evokes the
we go beyond the straight lines of issue of intersectionality within single subjects
happiness scripts.”18 as the reason that terms traveled so widely
within large communities of “deviants” and
Kaliarda also manages to make a somewhat “outcasts.”
humorous social critique with terms like “the
Vatican” (Βατικανό) to mean a gay menÕs Opacity – Some Passivity
brothel; a word referring to London that Subjects do not become invisible when talking in

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these languages; they can actually attract more otherness that was not understood as
interest from the public. But at the same time, specifically oppositional. As a “readerly”
the content of their discussion remains relation, irony is recognized, not written,
somewhat sealed and opaque. It is through this understood not declared. And irony would
practice, which is not vocal (although it is verbal) prove to be a means through which
and which does not actively disrupt the status resistance could figure in a culture of

06/09
quo (and yet builds an alternative social space), coercion.27
that passivity is generated as a political action. I
am referring to passivity not as a synonym for Cage used silence as a means to not be
inactivity, but rather as a variety of tactics that silent/silenced, and in a very similar manner
manage to subvert norms in ways that are not queer subjects opt out of mainstream modes of
initially intended. While such cultural communication and produce a separate sonic
productions (language, music, dance, space with with a specific membership.
performativities, etc.) are not created with the
intent to take over or substitute normative or
mainstream culture, as other “active” modes of
questioning would, they are forms of resistance.
They refuse to be assimilated and “normalized,”
choosing instead to produce an alternative that
provides a safer space of expression and which –
by the way – also has the potential to mock and
subvert the norm.
As Jonathan D. Katz says in reference to
John Cage’s silences: “Closeted people seek to
ape dominant discursive forms, to participate as
seamlessly as possible in hegemonic
constructions. They do not, in my experience,
draw attention to themselves.”25 All images courtesy of the author.

Thus, finding opaque ways of resisting

seems to be a somewhat efficient option. The While art is made in order to be public and
mannerisms and vocabulary of these slangs are communicated (at least in most cases) – and
flexible and made to be customizable so they can Cage’s art was very much so – these languages
better serve the speaker. are supposed to be communicated within certain
Creation and use of queer slangs is not a limits, those of the social space they help to
forceful destabilization of the status quo and the produce. I think the way they operate in
official/mainstream languages, but at the same producing rifts in wider society is by the casual,
time, using them is a refusal of complete silence. perhaps accidental moments they engender.
Silence here refers both to not speaking and to They don’t need to be translated, and one does
e-flux journal #60 — december 2014 Anna T.

not speaking audibly against the regime. Queer not need to be fully aware of the speakers’
slangs remain in a rather liminal space between subjectivities, but the sheer fact that certain
inactivity and straightforward revolutionary nonconforming individuals are speaking an
action. It is a form of creative resistance, a way unfamiliar dialect might be all it takes to create
The Opacity of Queer Languages

of producing a parallel social space of expression the impression that there is a very much present,
whose existence might in some ways indirectly active, and creative community producing its
affect the mainstream as well, without that own subculture, and that might already be
being the primary concern or objective behind enough.
them.These languages, when used in the vicinity These queer languages do not produce new,
of outsiders, are indeed audible but not politically informed revolutionary terminology.
transparent; they remain opaque, allowing the But they are very much present, occupying a
nonspeakers to identify the speakers as terrain between explicit action-oriented politics
belonging to a certain group, but not being able and compliance. They operate under cover of
to pinpoint what group that is. This creates a rift opacity and empower the marginalized, giving
in the homogenous social fabric. them space for existence, expression, and safety.
Katz addresses a similar paradox when he Queer languages are anti-authoritative and as
speaks of the irony in the work of John Cage, a such, according to Katz says, “they reveal the
composer who made the loudness of silence his power of the individual to construct meaning
hallmark: unauthorized by dominant culture – and all the
while, under its very nose.”28
Irony’s distinction between what is said and It’s not by accident that during the Greek
what is meant opened up a space of military dictatorship of the late 1960s and early

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‘70s, popular satirical theater used Kaliarda as a accomplish this and that herein resides the en-
way to avoid censorship. For “precarious” words, dangered beauty of the world … He dives into the
opacities of that share of the world to which he has
they substituted Kaliarda words, introducing
access.”32
these words to a general audience and letting
this audience figure them out for themselves. In
the UK a few years earlier, between 1965 and

07/09
1968, a BBC radio show that aired on Sunday
afternoons and addressed the “entire family”
featured two out-of-work camp actors who used
Polari at a time when homosexuality was still
illegal in the UK.
Kaliarda is nontransparent not only because
of its neologisms and semantically altered Greek
words, but also because it is spoken very fast.
The words acquire meaning and specificity
thanks to the contextualization offered by
performative gestures and body language.
Kaliarda is seen as the quintessence of camp
performance, which itself is often referred to as
a method of resistance that, according to David
Halperin, resists the power of the system from
within.29 As Nicholas De Villiers writes:

In an insistence of “Camp” as a queer

strategy of political resistance Moe Meyer
clarifies his use of the term in the following
way: “What ‘queer’ signals is an ontological
challenge that displaces bourgeois notions
of the Self as unique, abiding, and
continuous while substituting instead a
concept of the Self as performative,
improvisational, discontinuous and
processually constituted by repetitive and
stylized acts.”30

I think queer languages could be one of the

answers to De Villiers’s questions in the preface
of his book: “What if we were to look at speech as
e-flux journal #60 — december 2014 Anna T.

nonrevelatory, outside the parameters of

confession and truth, the humanist desire for
reflection, and the ideal of transparency? What if
we were to attend to its opacity? What would
The Opacity of Queer Languages

such an opacity look or sound like, and what

would be its function?”31
×
Author’s Note: While writing this text I tried to create some
tables with examples of words and expressions,
transliterated and translated from Kaliarda and Polari into
English, but I realized it was not going to work, and perhaps it
was okay that it did not. What I was forcing was a
transparency that didn’t want to be there. What I was trying
to accomplish (and miserably failed at doing) was beautifully
commented on by Celia Britton, who says that camouflaged
language can only be understood in a way that respects its
opacity and does not reduce it to transparency:

For the reader, too, opacity means that the text can
never be grasped as a whole, that is, as a wholly
known and therefore circumscribed entity. Instead,
the areas that remain opaque mean that its borders
are left undefined and open. Reading thus becomes
similar to “errance” (see chapter 1), in the sense that
“the wanderer [l’errant] … seeks to know the totality of
the world and knows already that he will never

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 Anna T. (1984) studied Photography, Video, and New 1 Franca terms. There are also
Media in Athens, Greece and holds a master’s degree Michael P. Brown, Closet Space:
Geographies of Metaphor from
in Queer Studies in Arts & Culture from Birmingham the Body to the Globe (London:
City University, UK. She is currently a PhD candidate at Routledge, 2010).
the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (PhD in Practice)
2 Parlyaree.
researching the proverbial closet. Her work spans Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories,
from photography and video to interactive audiovisual Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss
08/09
installations. Recurrent themes in her work are (New York: Routledge, 1991).
subjectivities in relation to time and space,
3 10
normativity, and public and private space. Typical of Slang is defined here as “a kind
her work is the extensive use of readymade objects, of language occurring chiefly in
digital media, and the invitation for the audience to casual and playful speech, made
up typically of short-lived
become an integral part of the work via interaction. coinages and figures of speech
She has worked as a cultural producer, curator, and that are deliberately used in
festival artistic director, and has collaborated place of standard terms for
extensively with academics, activists, and fellow added raciness, humor,
irreverence, or other
creatives in Greece, the UK, Germany, and Austria. effect;language peculiar to a
Since 2003 she has exhibited and participated in group; argot or jargon: thieves
numerous exhibitions and new media festivals in slang.” Argot is defined here “as
a specialized vocabulary or set
Europe, North and South America, Canada, and of idioms used by a particular
Australia. For more information please visit: group: thieves’ argot.” See
www.annatee.net http://www.thefreedictionary
.com
4 11
In this article I will primarily be
focusing on these, and not on
other forms of “slangs” that
include only a handful of
neologisms or semantically
altered or reclaimed words, of
which there are many worldwide
serving diverse communities.
5 Perspective,” University of the
David Van Leer in Nicholas De
Villiers, Opacity and the Closet:
Queer Tactics in Foucault,
Barthes, and Warhol
(Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2012), 21.
6 13
Heidi Minning in Speaking in
Queer Tongues: Globalization and
Gay Language, eds. William Leap
and Tom Boellstorff(Champaign:
University of Illinois Press,
2004), 624.
7 ambiguous a comment as that
Elias Petropoulos, Kaliarda
e-flux journal #60 — december 2014 Anna T.
(Athens: Nefeli, Athens, 1971);
Nicholas Kontovas, Lubunca:
The Historical Development of
Istanbul’s Queer Slang and a
Social-Functional Approach to
Diachronic Processes in
Language, Master of Arts in the
The Opacity of Queer Languages
Department of Central Eurasian
Studies, Indiana University,
December 2012; Paul Baker,
Polari –The Lost Language of Gay
Men (New York: Routledge,
2002).
8 researcher/observer.
According to Paul Baker, who
has conducted extended
research on Polari, Cant, a
secret language used by
criminals in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, evolved
into Polari via Parlyaree, a slang
used by the “despised category”
of actors which evolved in the
late eighteenth century. The
latter also seems to be
employed by circus people who
used words from “backslang,
rhyming slang and gypsies.”
According to twentieth-century
lexicographer Eric Partridge,
circus people also used Italian
and Mediterranean Lingua
12.11.14 / 13:55:08 EST
references to “Grafter’s Slang”
(by Philip Allingham) which
includes Italian, Romani, and
Yiddish words, and which
Partridge classified as
9
Petropoulos, Kaliarda.
Interview with Paulistano
Juliana Correia de Xaquino
conducted in June 2013, and
with Carioca artist Pedro Costa
conducted on October 2014.
Traces found in Antonio Gomes
da Costa Neto’s “A Linguagem no
Candomblé: Um estudo
lingüístico sobre as
comunidades religiosas afro-
brasileiras” as well as articles in
the blogosphere, e.g., by Eloisa
Aquino, a Brazilian-born zinister
http://nomorepotlucks.org/si
te/pajuba-the-secret-languag e-
of-brazilian-travestis-elo isa-
aquino/.
Reinerio A. Alba, “The Filipino
Gayspeak (Filipino Gay Lingo),”
2005
http://www.ncca.gov.ph/about -
culture-and-arts/articles-o n-c-
n-
a/article.php?i=289&subcat=13.
Sonny Atencia Catacutan,
“Swardspeak: A Queer
Philippines Open University,
MMS121 Multimedia and
Popular Culture, 2013–14.
12
Kontovas, Lubunca.
Baker, Polar.
14
As a native Greek speaker with a
certain proficiency in English
and a significant degree of
immersion in those cultures (as
may be) after having lived in
Greece and England, I believe I
am capable of understanding
the cultural context and the role
this plays in understanding the
specific references, the humor,
and the “tone” of those slangs. I
don’t think I would be able to
fully appreciate these slangs
had I only known the official
languages without having been
immersed in the culture. The
other six slangs remain
inaccessible to me, leaving me in
the position of a mere
15
Nicholas Kontovas, a researcher
who is the only one so far
(October 2014) to have published
in English a thorough study of
Lubunca, claims the same to be
true of it. For more information
on Lubunca see Nicholas
Kontovas, Lubunca, ibid.
16
Petropoulos, Kaliarda.
17
Quoted in Sara Ahmed, The
Promise of Happiness (Duke
University Press, 2010), 151.
 32
18 Celia Britton, Edouard Glissant
Ibid. and Postcolonial Theory:
Strategies of Language and
19 Resistance (Charlottesville, VA:
Petropoulos, Kaliarda. University Press of Virginia,
1999), 153 and 156.
20
Baker, Polari, 13.

09/09
21
Kontovas, Lubunca.

22
Baker, Polari, 13.

23
Petropoulos, Kaliarda.

24
According to Pedro Costa, who
first encountered Pajubá words
in Umbanda’s terreiro (spiritual
place of the Afro-Brazilian
religion), these words derived
from the religious sphere.
According to Eloisa Aquino, it
was the need of queers for a
more liberal religious practice
that pushed them to borrow
words from Candomblé
practitioners.

25
Jonathan Katz, “John Cage’s
Queer Silence or How to Avoid
Making Matters
Worse”http://www.queercultur
alcenter.org/Pages/KatzPages
/KatzWorse.html

26
Of course, many slang words
have made it into the
mainstream, and the
mainstream doesn’t even know
they are using gay slang, tricking
the breeders into speaking in a
gay tongue and communicating
in notions that either didn’t exist
before, or that were rebranded
by the poofters. Such cases have
been well documented in both
Kaliarda and Polari, with terms
like “tzouss”(τζους), ÒntanaÓ
(ντάνα), ÒkolobarasÓ
(κωλομ¹ αράς), and ÒbaraÓ
(μ¹ άρα). In mainstream English
e-flux journal #60 — december 2014 Anna T.

there is “naff” (an acronym for

“not available for fucking,” often
used in a derogatory manner
towards heterosexuals), which
refers to something tasteless.

27
The Opacity of Queer Languages

Katz, “John Cage’s Queer

Silence.”

28
Ibid.

29
[Camp is] “a form of cultural
resistance that is entirely
predicated on a shared
consciousness of being
inescapably situated within a
powerful system of social and
sexual meaning that resists the
power of that system from
within.” David Halperin quoted in
De Villiers, Opacity and the
Closet, 20.

30
De Villiers, Opacity and the
Closet, 16.

31
Ibid., 5.

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