Queer Praxis: The Daily Labors of Love and Agitation
Files
Academic Unit
College of Arts and Sciences
Publication Date
2021
Document Type
Book Chapter
Abstract
Queer praxis the working, doing, living and every process of queering. It is the work of hope, anticipation, resistance, and imagining outside the violences of social categorizations- of longing sideways and gesturing other-wards and otherwise. In short, it is the work of worldmaking. Thus, it is a creative, collaborative, and ever-shifting project for a multiracial, multigendered, multi-everything social imaginary. It is about interrogating the legacies of privilege around our relations, our bodies, and our communities in order to disrupt and challenge the exclusions, limitations, and violences of our patterned ways of being, knowing, and doing. Queer praxis is about a constant and arduous process to be better in relation and connection to a range of differences too often devalued. It is about interrogating the places we may have had voice, position, comfort, and access. It is about undoing, redoing, and continually learning to make room, surrender space, redirect our gaze, and halt our defensive dances. Queer praxis hopes and labors for more humane, more durable ways to be and exist in our world across difference. It is work, It is process. And, it is ever-fallible.
This chapter interrogates the personal and relational work of queering in daily life- as labor, loving, agitation, and praxis. Thus, we frame queerness as an action, an ethic, and a relational project owned by no one and differently accessible to everyone. Specifically, we examine faulty tensions in this work- competing dimensions of queer work that discursively create divisions and oppositions that paradoxically mobile and impede, both somewhat literally and metaphorically akin to the Cartesian mind/body split, where a wholly enmeshed and inter-reliant system is severed into a false binary. Queer praxis sits at the intersections and reintegrations of the lived and the theoretical, the individual and the relational, and the global and immediately situated. This chapter is a meditation upon these interconnections and false binaries that shape, foster, and impede queer praxis. First this chapter challenges the tendency for queerness to linger in the abstract and theoretical. This, in turn, demands the necessity to position queerness in the material, lived, embodied, and relational- thus the performative- dimensions of queer lives and practices. Second, the chapter explores resistance to minoritizing patterns that reduce the work of queer worldmaking to either gender queer or categorical queer postures. Resisting normalizing tendencies to cast queerness in terms that privilege white, cis, masculine frameworks, this resistance calls for constant reflection, decentering, and accountability for who and how queerness is being framed, what stories are being centralized, and to whose benefit and exclusion. Third, the chapter looks to queer praxis as a daily and moment-by-moment resistance, an opportunity and radically contextualized action, rather than an identity or fixed position. These resistances are elaborated through a series of mundane questions, statements, and encounters, exploring both the strategies and risks of queering (even as these shift and change).
ISBN
9780367622497
Publisher
Routledge
Exhibit Details
https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Handbook-of-Gender-and-Communication/NilesGoins-FaberMcAlister-Alexander/p/book/9780367622497
Recommended Citation
Goltz, Dustin Bradley and Zingsheim, Jason, "Queer Praxis: The Daily Labors of Love and Agitation" (2021). Faculty Authors and Creators Reception. 219.
https://opus.govst.edu/fac/219
Description
Chapter 33: Queer Praxis: The Daily Labors of Love and Agitation in the Routledge Handbookof Gender and Communication Goins, M. N.; McAlister, J. F.; Alexander, B. K. (eds.)