Giulia Astesani
MAKE ME FEEL, MIGHTY QUEER
Summary
This research is centred on how queer bodies navigate the ambivalent feelings of needing recognition while searching for different narratives of happiness.
Through an expanded performative practice, the project engages with an active process of archiving queer lives while critically questioning contemporary representations of queerness. Drawing from feminist and queer theory, archival material, pop culture and autobiographical fragment, it focuses on queer women and the gender non-conforming. This project prioritises the use of feeling and emotions as valuable tools for research, proposing strategies of unknowing, un-doing and unbecoming in opposition to oppressive normative narratives of progress, success and happiness.
Additional info
This research aims at bending the binary regime in which queerness as a social and cultural identity tends to be represented, e.g., radical or normative, private or political, invisibility or representational, as both perpetuated by normative institutions and mainstream media but also by the queer community itself. Instead, I propose to develop notions of Queer as a site for 'self-critique' and 'permanent becoming' (Jagose, 1996). A place for aching discord.
Ahmed describes comfort as the effect of bodies' 'sinking' into spaces, which have already taken their
shape (Ahmed, 2015), implying that queer bodies always come with a certain level of discomfort, or failure
(Halberstam, 2011) because they live through narratives and structures, they are unable or unwilling to
reproduce or fit into fully.
In this sense, queerness comes with the potentiality of suspending and re-orienting normative scripts in
which 'happiness' is promised due to complying with particular notions of living (e.g., gender binary, nuclear
family, reproduction, wealth accumulation).
If queerness is understood as a place in between, a place of discomfort and uncertainty, can this state of precariousness be used as a tool to nurture and celebrate the transitory, elusive and plural nature of happiness, freeing ourselves up from unattainable and damaging expectations of a 'happy life'?
Through an expanded performative and writing practice, I aim to physically embody, this uncertain space, exploring and narrating pathways through it, in which personal feelings are inextricably linked to the political world we live in and vice versa (Preciado, 2013). I propose occupying a wilder (Halberstam, 2020), uncategorised space where language and images intricately overlap, investigating the link between the poetic and the political sphere of representation.
This work rather than prescribing answers wants to embrace a constant state of questioning, by opposing normative narratives of progress and happiness with one that embraces the foggy contours of identity and values vulnerability and the painful, ambivalent feelings implied in the process of becoming.
I propose that it is in staying with the discomfort, or the trouble (Haraway, 2016), which these feelings can ignite, that other ways of doing and coming together in the world can be found.
Subjecting my own identity to critique I am particularly interested in reclaiming agency while igniting a
disidentification process (Munoz, 1999), the decision to collect material to portray narratives of queer
women and the gender non-conforming is personally specific.
I believe that these identities still tend to elude representation, complicating the binary of the 'visible' and
the 'not-seen', between the power of visibility and the impotency of invisibility (Pelan, 1996), potentially
proposing ways of living that escape hetero-patriarchal structures.
Furthermore, acknowledging the complexity of queerness and its slippery modes of representation which neither identifies with nor strictly rejects dominant culture (Munoz, 1999), I am employing a heterogeneous mix of sources to collect, investigate and build upon.
These sources are the site of my research as well as the raw materials of my practice. Particularly relevant
for the project and its sustainability is its rooting in the experiences, relationships, thoughts, language that
define and make the queer community I am a part of and exist in connection with.
Peer conversations, exchange of texts and photographs, voice messages, emails, become essential tools in
the development of the practice, being at times the starting point for the writing, and at others, a response
to it, creating a non-linear narrative that explores the possibilities of embodying queerness today, with all
its contradictions.
The archiving of these multiple queer fragments and documents becomes a meaning-making tool, but also a strategy to engage with a genealogy of queer practices in resisting erasure while trying to grapple with the authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what can be known (Hartman, 2019), on which narratives matters.
I must be 5 or 6 years old. I'm standing on a traghetto pier in Venice.
My small hands are holding tightly onto a big black hat, which has a blue feather and a golden and red ribbon of some sort attached to it.
The hat is part of a much more intricate carnival costume.
Red fabric boots cover my shoes and part of my legs, puffy black trousers are popping out from under a red and gold vest with a shiny cross printed in the middle, and a black plastic sword is kept in place by a strip of golden cloth around my waist.
Under the vest, a white shirt covers my arms, and a red cape is falling onto my back, to finish the costume off, my favourite detail – black moustaches – are drawn over my upper lip.
I'm dressed up as D'Artagnan, one of the three musketeers. From the photograph, it appears to be a sunny day, and I look excited, I can almost recall the smell of the costume — a synthetic smell of something that has been kept in plastic for a long time
(Re)visiting.
It's not possible to live twenty-four hours a day soaked in the immediate awareness of one's sex. Gendered self-consciousness has, mercifully, a flickering nature. (Nelson)
Message n1
I've seen vids of crocodiles in a gender reveal party and I'm like…evolution will do its job.
It is September 2020, and a violent wild-fire in California which resulted in extensive damage, evacuation and land loss, was started by what the news described as a 'smoke-generating pyrotechnic device' used in a gender reveal party.
The result of this news is that I get lost in a YouTube black hole for hours.
Balloons blow up ejecting blue or pink confetti into the air, awful looking cakes being cut open to show the party guests whether the expectant couple will give birth to a little boy or a girl.
Soon, during my descent into the gender reveal nightmare, I start realising how many of these celebrations went from the slightly to terribly wrong, and I stumble into yet another video and yet another fire.
The video dates back a couple of years. It is 2018 in Arizona, the camera is recording a black shooting target surrounded by tall, dry grass. The words ‘Boy or Girl’ are handwritten on it, and soon the target, which I learn is packed with explosives, is shot by the father-to-be with a high-powered rifle.
A big blue cloud violently leaks out into the air and shortly afterwards the grass starts burning, all the while the voice of a man nervously suggests packing everything up and leaving, before the video cuts out.
The fire ended up destroying 47,000 acres and resulted in $8 million in damages, not to mention all the people who had to be evacuated.
Never before had I watched unfolding in a slow-motion video, the damage that heteronormativity can wreak.
'We may, ultimately, want more undisciplined knowledge, more questions and fewer answers' (Halberstam)
Message n2
You both look extra gay.
I remember coming back home, you told me the porter had asked if we were both 'real' women, (what constitutes a real woman?) because he couldn't make sense of the fact, we were a couple.
He said he knew of Elton John, but that's how far his knowledge got. You told him we were married. I don't know if that made things better or worse.
I think about that a lot. Being queer and married.
The night of our wedding I remember joking with a friend and telling them: 'I can't believe I married a lesbian'.
Is desire, always a desire for recognition?
Desire from WITH-OUT
In an interview dating back 1993, Judith Butler describes to the interviewer the painful irony of being implicated in the very forms of power that one explicitly opposes and trying to understand what kind of agency might be derived from that situation.
Can I rearticulate normative narratives while being part of it? Or is that a defeat?
Am I bad at being queer?
Message n3
What are your biggest turn-ons?
I was at the archive yesterday, and I read about someone getting off by looking at a National Geographic's cover.
Death queers, old queens, sad butches, lonely hearts, diesel dykes, leather, cocks, straps.
As it was a boarding school, on games day we were able to go to the dormitories together. One day she drew me in through the door and ran her hands over my breast and kissed me passionately. Then she put her hands under my skirt and drew down my knickers. Her hand seemed to shoot to my sex, and she soon had me very damp. She then put me on the bed and proceeded to spank me, slow but not painfully. Ever since then I have always preferred a woman. (Sandra Bellamy, Liverpool)
Is queer desire, radical?
Whatever sameness I've noted in my relationships with women it is not the sameness of Woman, and certainly not the sameness of parts. Rather, it is the shared crushing understanding of what it means to live in a patriarchy. (Nelson)
We were sitting in the director’s office at the bank and after a few minutes he asks his assistant to bring the documents in, so my husband and I could sign them.
My.
Husband.
And.
I.
You nor I had (have) any issues in being read as a different gender from the one we identify with, but he knew that you were my wife, he just couldn't (wouldn't?) say it.
It's bizarre how much meaning we attach to words.
Queer unhappiness offers a rather deviant form of fertility (Ahmed)
When I look back at that day, I think about the irony of the whole thing - his inability to let go of normative expectations/language resulted in the sudden fashioning of a much more gender-bending scenario than the one we were experiencing.
Message n4:
There is a new girl in my work.
She's a lesbian
Fucking unicorn!
I'm weirdly happy about having another lesbian at my workplace
I keep visualising the same image.
I'm standing in front of a lush, beautiful landscape, I can see its edges, but one imposing building is obscuring my view.
And I suddenly realise that everyone else is looking at the same building.
Please, Vacate the here and now. (Munoz)
It's my birthday, and I just ingested some ecstasy.
I'm high, my grip on reality is loosening, and rational thoughts are pushed back into a corner by feelings of amusement and inexplicable joy. While all of this is happening, for a fleeting moment I realise that one big building that was obstructing my view is no longer there.
When I wake up, the day after, slightly dizzy and tired, I wonder if that feeling can be experienced without being chemically induced.
Can we be happy even when we are sad?
Message n5
You are bad lesbians!!
How do you tell a story that does not want to be told?
It’s the 1st of December 2020, yesterday it was our wedding anniversary, it is three years that we are legally bound to each other which is strange since it’s almost a year that we have not lived together, and almost seven years since we first met.
1, 3, 7. Time is a funny thing.
Everyone keeps sending me messages about loops, open loops and loops that needs ending.
I’m not sure what they mean.
Am I stuck in a loop? In light of this thought, yesterday I accessed the government website and started filing for divorce.
The application starts by asking: has your marriage broken down irretrievably (it can’t be saved?)
Tick yes to continue the application.
I find it quite odd the idea that relationships might break irreversibly like objects/things.
Last week I put three of my favourite jumpers in the washing machine and even though I used the supposedly right setting they all came out half the size and so became unwearable, as much as I tried, I could just no longer fit into them.
So, I am standing there looking at my shrunken jumpers thinking they have lots more in common with my marriage than what I could ever imagined.
Yes. Continue application.
Grounds for divorce:
- Adultery – it is important to note that you can only rely on this ground if your spouse has had sexual intercourse with a member of the opposite sex. You cannot rely on adultery if your spouse has committed adultery with a person of the same sex.
Jesus. How is it that even by participating in one of the most normative patriarchal institutions that a queer person (or anyone really) could sign up to, the legitimacy of my relationship is still somehow put into question.
As if the ending of love wasn’t painful enough.
Could we just fucking abolish not even gender but people. I think I’m done. (Lang)
This whole thing is starting to feel like a scam.
Message n6
Queer the world!
It's the opening of my show in Milan, and I spend a big part of the evening trying to respond to people's question 'what is Queer'?
Many of these people are not asking what's my take on queerness, or my interpretation of it but to define a term they never encountered before.
I think that after all, that's fair. Italy has no historical connection to the word Queer.
I could spend the night repeating to people how activists in the US and UK have reappropriated the word, how it was an insult, like culattone, checca, finocchio, offensive words to describe gay men in Italy. Then I scan into my brain trying to find offensive words for lesbians, but there aren’t any.
I then think that the absence of words is as revelatory as their presence.
I then think that I hardly used the word lesbica when I describe myself in Italy.
I then think I use a word that has no heritage or context in my country to describe myself and my identity.
I then think that maybe I don't use the word lesbica because it feels dirty, offensive and that perhaps it makes me feel uncomfortable.
I then think that's fucked up.
I then think I should use it more often.
I then think, that before I thought of myself as queer, before I even began to understand what queer is, I thought of myself as a lesbian.
I then think about my last summer in Italy. Whilst at the bar watching the Italian women's football team playing against Australia during the world cup, Serena asked me how I identify.
I then think I didn't really know how to answer, but I told her as a woman and as a lesbian, and that I also liked the word dyke.
I then think how it was the first time in history that a women's game was broadcast on a channel belonging to Italy’s national television.
To be a fag is not enough to be 'queer'. It's necessary to subject your own identity to critique. (Preciado)
