Queering Autoethnography

Stacy Holman Jones, Anne M. Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138286160
• eBook ISBN: 9781351976503
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Queering Autoethnography articulates for the first time the possibilities and politics of queering autoethnography, both in theoretical terms and as an intervention into narratives and cultures of apology, shame and fear. Despite the so-called mainstreaming of same-sex relationships and trans* visibility, many within gender's 'liminal zone' remain invisible and unrecognized, existing somewhere outside of heteronormative relationships and institutions. At the same time, the political and scholarly potential of autoethnography is expanding, particularly in its potential to evoke empathic and affective responses at a time of public numbness, a practice crucial to making scholarly research relevant to the work of global citizenship and crafting meaningful lives.

This volume considers flash points in contemporary scholarly and popular culture such as queer memorializing and mourning; unintelligibility and monstrosity; physical, digital and cultural transformations of queer lives and bodies; the power and danger wrought in the public assembly of queer people in a culture of massacre; and the promise of queer futurities in the contemporary moment. It also makes original theoretical contributions that include concepts such as massacre culture, queer terror, mundane annihilations, and activist affect. The authors write these ideas in action, joining theory and story as a contact zone for analysis, critique and change.

1
Queering Monuments

Monument to Rehearsal

We are driving from Melbourne to Alice Springs in a small car packed with books, blankets and a bag or two of groceries—snacks for us and biscuits for Luna, the matriarch cocker spaniel who is dying of cancer.

We are driving the 2,256 kilometers from Melbourne to Alice Springs so that you can do research, so I can see Australia’s wide open for the first time, and so Luna can return to her birthplace one last time—a kind of canine ‘roots trip’ (Harris 2015, p. 162).

We drive the twenty-four hours from Melbourne to Alice Springs in a hurry because Luna is restless in the car—the wincing moan of the steel cattle grates set into the highway makes her unsteady on her feet and unable to sleep.

You drive from Melbourne to Alice Springs while Luna and I sit in the back. She stands, feet planted on either side of my hips, and leans into me. I hold her and hum a song into her ear. Every few kilometers, you reach back and put your hand on Luna’s head, resting it there until your arm cramps and you have to move.

When we arrive in Alice, Luna becomes herself again. She sticks her nose out the window and sniffs, pulling the winter desert air into her lungs. You stop the car. I open the door and Luna hops out. She picks her way carefully through the bush, not looking back. She knows we will follow and we do. We walk up and over the crest of a hill, catching sight of Luna just as she lays down on her side in the dry riverbed and kicks her feet.

You say she remembers the geography of this place—the rocks and hills, the scent of the neighborhood you haven’t lived in for years, the sound of the river that only flowed a handful of times when you did live there. Memory recollects in her nose and ears, under her feet, in the “pure experience of the welling now” (Manning 2013, p. 73). You say she is walking, running, smelling and swimming as a rehearsal for death.

Performance scholar Theron Schmidt (2015) describes the process of rehearsal as movement that recollects the future. He writes, “we recollect forwards whilst remembering backwards” (p. 5). Rehearsal enacts the “strange temporality” of preparing for an experience in the act of its making. Rehearsal is for making an act that will ‘work’ in the moment we need it—a play, a dance, a recital, a death. We begin “as if we are looking back at a previous action, a repetition, a re-enactment, even as we look forward to an event that does not yet exist” (Schmidt 2015, p. 5). We rehearse for death as a monument to remembering the welling now of life.

We drive from Melbourne to Alice Springs so that Luna can return to her birthplace and rehearse her death. When we arrive, Luna becomes herself again—emergent, in tune with and attuned to the pulse and scent of her environment, vibrating with the desert taking form beneath her.

Rehearse—to give an account of.

To go over again, repeat, literally, to rake over, to turn over.

From re, again and hercier, to drag, to trail on the ground.

To rake, harrow, rip, tear, wound, repeat.

Rehearse, from re, again, and hearse—

a flat framework for candles over a coffin, a large chandelier hung in a church.

Rehearse, from re, again, and hearse, a harrow—

a rustic word containing allusions to wolves’ teeth and rakes,

a means for moving the dead; to wound the feelings, distress.

To say over again, repeat what has already been said.¹

Rehearse—to give an account when

“what forms us diverges from what lies before us.”

(Butler 2005, p. 136)

Luna lays down on her side in the dry riverbed and kicks her feet. She is swimming, swimming, swimming in the red dirt water of the Todd Riverbed. The moon rises, illuminating her path, a canopy of ghost gum branches make a harrow for bearing her body.

Monument to Monuments

Monuments mark and remember the passing of time, experiences and beings, though they do so in a present that vibrates with what’s yet to come. The monuments we make do not stand in isolation from the culture that brings them into material being but instead as embodiments and enactments of lifeworlds and ways of living. The human act of building cairns or markers to events both culturally grand and personally intimate has been the subject of philosophical investigation for eons (Bradley 2012/1998). In Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment, E.V. Walter articulates a notion of ‘topistics,’ derived from the Greek word topos, as a

new name by which I hope to renew the context of an old inquiry … methods and ideas of a holistic form of inquiry designed to render the identity, character, and experience of a place intelligible. The full range of meaning located as a ‘place’—sensory perceptions, moral judgments, passions, feelings, ideas, and orientations—belong to an order of intelligibility that I call ‘topistic reality.’

(1988, p. 21)

His topistics draws on Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of space (1958/2014) to “capture poetic features of space … a nonfragmentary, theoretical framework to grasp the whole experience of place and space” (1988, p. 18). Walter’s theorizing of the ‘feelings of place’ attempts to incorporate a more holistic intersectioning of “intellect, common sense, and imagination” (1988, p. 21). Here, place is understood as “a location of experience. It evokes and organizes memories, images, feelings, sentiments, meanings and the work of imagination” (1988, p. 21).

Within Walter’s somewhat dated articulation lies the seeds of a new materialist understanding of memorials as vibrant matter (Bennett 2009). In this view, monuments are both a material form (or formation) and a “living, vital and immediate” force that has material affects (Nelson & Olin 2003, p. 3). In other words, monuments are alive—they have specific ways of being in the world and make themselves felt as themselves (Walter 1988, p. 117), just as human bodies are material reminders of other bodies, experiences, memories and sensations.

In this chapter we are concerned with how words build monuments to queer bodies and lives through story (Solnit 2016). Stories stand as memorials to experience, relationally grounding us in particular times and places; stories also move us not only emotionally but also in embodied, physical ways. The performance or the movement of monuments—how bodies perform and give substance to monuments, how monuments are relational, how monuments create audiences—is an enactment of memory, futurity, politics and love. For queer people, monument making has powerfully served both impulses and needs, perhaps no less powerfully than in the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt in the US. The 48,000-panel quilt serves as a memorial to the lives of those who have died of AIDS with each 3-foot by 6-foot lovingly stitched by friends, lovers and family members (AIDS Memorial Quilt 2017). The quilt is also a material embodiment of not only the devastating toll of the disease but also the power of a memorial object and its integral role in the movement to raise funds and awareness to battle the AIDS pandemic (AIDS Memorial Quilt 2017).

Storying monuments as movement is what Erin Manning might call “a quasi-virtual experience: actual because all steps actually take place, virtual because all the microperceptions of pastness and futurity are enveloped in the becoming-movement” (2009, p. 38). And as the AIDS Memorial Quilt demonstrates, “the queer storying of monument-as-movement is an act of willful remembering—the embodiment of a struggle to exist or transform an existence” (Ahmed 2014, pp. 134, 133). Queer bodies, experiences and lives have often been omitted or forgotten by history and queer people have long fought to combat erasure and neglect. We have fought, too, to mourn of the loss of individual lives alongside the effort to claim and create livable lives as queer people (Butler 2004; see also Crimp 1989; Muñoz 1999; Ahmed 2017).

And what of the monument-body that memorializes?

That struggles to know what to do with change, with transformation, and grief, reckoning the body with things passing? That seeks to materialize experience, desire and emotion in an “iterative remembering” (Fitzgerald 2009, p. 86) that is both ‘public’ and ‘personal’?

Garden as Monument

Morning blinks through the gap in the drapes, illuminating the soft swale at the foot of the bed where she slept just yesterday. She is gone, gone, her body carried away—not on a harrow of ghost gum branches—but in my arms. After a walk in sweet grass, a meal befitting a queen and a thousand kisses, we send her off with the whisper of song in her ear. I swaddle her in the blanket that kept her from the cold following our return from the desert and place her in the back seat of the merciful veterinarian’s car. We stand in the street, hands in the air, waving her off on her shape-shifting journey.

A week later she returns—body reclaimed by flame to the red dust of her riverbed beginnings. I waver over where she might like best to sit, lie, sleep, make her place in this return to home, but only for a moment. On a sunny Saturday morning, I work her red dirt body into the loamy soil of our garden, the tiny patch of sunshine and natives that was hers and mine. The place we’d go after I’d been away traveling to put our hands and paws into the dirt, to sniff the winter Melbourne air, reanimate to our connection and our bodies. To return to the earth. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Sara Ahmed (2014) writes of “becoming memorial” as a shift from one state or form of relating to another. She writes of becoming memorial in relation to the companionship formed between a man (in this case, the George Eliot character Silas Marner) and an earthenware pot that he used to fetch water every day for years. She writes of the sensation and intermingling of touch, body, earth and love:

Silas is touched by his pot. The pot is his companion; reliable, always lending its handle… . The pot is mingled with other things … the fresh clear water the pot helps to carry, the body carrying the pot … A relation of use is one of affection.

(2014, p. 44)

When the pot, the material object, breaks, the relation of use and our ways of relating shift; what remains is the affection. The broken pot takes up a new use, a new way of relating by “becoming memorial; a holder of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Queering Autoethnography
• 1 Queering Monuments
• 2 Queering Massacres
• 3 Queering Movements
• 4 Queering Mx
• 5 Queering Monsters
• 6 Queering Memory
• Index