[-empyre-] Queer *Is* Violent: Response to Part of Judith's Position/Statement

[Robert Summers]

I would respectfully yet disagree with many aspects of what Judith wrote,

One passage: *Robert's original call asked about the _possible_
heteronormativity of
*relational aesthetics.* I'm not interested in *torturing* anything, whether
bodies or the proper names of continental theorists, but I am interested in
*the democratic space of the *violence of participation,* though I'd add
quite emphatically not as the repetition of violence or even the
metaphorical torturing of anything but as the exploration of, for example,
behaviors, obedience to authority among them. *Queering* relational
aesthetics, then, is productive inasmuch as it forces that metadiscursive
activity.*

Indeed, there is, I argue, a certain *violence* to/of queer(ing).  In
the words of Sedgwick, "'[q]ueer’ is a continuing moment, movement,
motive—recurrent, eddying, troublant. The word ‘queer’ itself means
across -- it comes from the Indo-European root -twerkw, which also
yields the German quer (transverse), Latin torque (to twist), English
athwart” (_Tendencies_, 1993: xii).  This *speaks* of a certain
violence (*torque* can also be traced to torture, which is an act of
violence), and to queer (or queering -- which I want to also use as a
transitive verb, which would violate/torture rules of grammar) *is*
violence against the normative (and queer _does_ do/enact more than
just this), and we can *see* a certain *queering* as a certain
*violence* when Derrida states, in a way that shows the slippage
between binary oppositions, *... a caress may be a blow and vice
versa. … And let us not exclude either that certain experience of
touching (of 'who touches whom') do
not simply pertain to blows and caresses.  What about a kiss?  Is it
one caress among many?  What about a kiss on the mouth?  What about a
biting kiss, as well as everything that can then be exchanged between
lips, tongues, and teeth?  Are blows wanting there?  Are they absent
in coitus, in all the penetrations or acts of homosexual or
heterosexual sodomy?  Is a 'caress,' more so than a 'blow'? (_On
Touching_, 2005: 69)*

I do not think we need to participate in the reifying of binary
oppositions (either/or), and I do not believe in *meta* anything.  I
would never argue that *queering* is a *meta* anything.  Why this turn
to the *meta* -- which implied both a transcendence and an outside?
And it is interesting that Judith states *Queering* relational
aesthetics, then, is productive inasmuch as it _forces_ that metadiscursive
activity* (emp. mine).  Here we are at a certain violence, a force,
even as it is disavowed.

I mean this to be polemical, btw.

Robert Summers, PhD/ABD
Lecturer
Art History and Visual Culture
Otis College of Art and Design
e: rsummers at otis.edu
w: http://ospace.otis.edu/robtsum/Welcome