Just as new media texts and practices prompt us to reconsider what “literacy” means, so too do they enable us to reconsider what sexuality and sexual identity (always already discursive) mean. Our installation attempts to understand the multiple layerings of sex, text, and technology as sites from which to perform queer identities--and maybe just to perform queer. Specifically, we explore the radical, disruptive invocation of body, gender, desire, fear, and sensation that is the (new-)mediated queer self. We make use of our converging alienations, our mesh of desire and want, in order to position ourselves to be—if only for a particular, rhetorical moment—and, more to the point of this particular work, to be sexual. Through the constant exchange/deferral of need, this self-positioning increases and sustains itself through its desire, serving as the engine of its own perpetual visibility. It is thus a generative, multimodal techne of self, with both somatic and representational consequence.
Our view of techne—a sort of generative lived knowledge—points less to the prescriptive how-to sense of the term and more to its ethical, civic dimension. Our view demands that we embrace the incommensurability of bodily self and representation at the same time as we acknowledge the importance of lived experience to the formation of an ethical stance. It’s important to clarify, however, that our sense of sexuality and ethics does not cover “appropriate” sexual behavior or sexual manners, but instead draws from a close examination of the discourses surrounding the sexual self. What behaviors, what subjectivities, what possibilities, and what impossibilities are created through the intersections of sex and text? It is with this view in mind that we attempt to perform in our installation our own encounters—as sexed and sexual beings—with a variety of texts.
We contend that what is most attractive about queerness—theoretically, personally, and politically—is its potential illegibility, its inability to be reductively represented, its disruptive potential—in a word, its impossibility. At many different moments, queerness appears (or emerges or erupts) to trouble normalcy, legitimacy, signification. It’s what doesn’t fit. It’s what skews, bends, or queers the realities we construct around ourselves, and that have been constructed for us to induce a hetero-normative sense of stability and progress through the replication of particular kinds of people in particular kinds of families.
Queerness disrupts such stability, such progress. And as a movement of disruption, it is often difficult to track, to catch, to identify. Gays and lesbians are often positioned in relation to the normative, often as those seeking a place at the table—and many gays and lesbians are seeking that place. But in our lives as a gay man and as a lesbian, we have encountered numerous instances in which our queerness most certainly does not fit in, where it marks us as separate, as possessing and possessed by a subjectivity that is often incommensurably other.
Those are often our most delicious moments. And the most critically insightful and revealing, for that moment of instantiation—of the flesh made real—seems ripe for rhetorical and embodied action, one that encourages an attention to the moments of uncertainty between desire and hope, bodily self and representation, lived experience and ethical stance.
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