Queer Two: From the Special Issue Editor

As I looked back over the pieces I chose to include in this year’s Queer issue, I was struck by how engaged many of them are with the body and its surfaces, the body and its orifices, the body and its functions, the body and its fluids. What the body desires, how the body inhabits space. Another recurring theme is obsession. Obsession with the bodies and selves of others. Obsession with habits. Obsession with popular culture. Obsession with text. Text that foregrounds the body, the text itself a body, embodied text. Obsession with language, with form, with the shapes taken by our bodies and desires.

When I sat down to write an introduction for this year’s issue, I panicked a little bit. I wasn’t sure what I had to say about the “need” for queer writing, the “value” of queer writing (recognizing how these terms are held captive by heteronormativity and capitalism’s emphases on “use value”) that I did not already say last year.

Then I remembered this fantastic poem-essay-hybrid text that accompanied our contributor Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal’s submission. It says so much about the linguistics of queerness, about queer’s potentialities and constrictions, and the liminal space between the two where art happens. I have always wanted this issue to catalyze others, and to situate itself in radical community, and so I am very happy to let one of our contributors “do the work for me.” I got to meet and hang out with Tracy this past weekend at the &Now Festival of Innovative Writing, and experience her “reading” of the music video for Rihanna’s song “S & M”, which, like this text, and hopefully, this entire issue, inhabited an utterly compelling and difficult to categorize aesthetic, a hodgepodge of academic, intellectual, political and creative generation. You should feel totally jealous I got to see Tracy’s presentation, and you missed it.

But hey, guess what? You still get to read this issue.
~ TJY

“Queer” (by Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal)

always look at “k” for something humorous. (the phoneme /k/ is not in fact correlated with the letter itself.)

words that describe what humor can be: off-color, off-kilter, off; surprising, shocking, strange; curious, queer.

/kwɪ(ə)r/

something about “qu” is phonetically off. a voiceless stop caught in your mouth. it resists being articulated. /kw/ wants to be /k/, but it wasn’t born that way.

marx says the commodity is a very queer thing. the commodity is put in a position of being treated as if it has meaning that it was made to have. queers, too. “queer,” also.

something about “uee” is phonetically backwards. it puts the mouth in the unfortunate position of having to move from a fish face to a frog face, from sucking on a straw to eating a sandwich, from a kiss to a smile. usually, smiles precede kisses. they don’t always follow them.

things that sound like /kwɪ(ə)r/: a door opening, a drawer opening, a pissed off cat, old ford breaks around a turn, the sound a child makes before the final explosion sound when signifying a car crash, the imitation of a record scratching made by some one who doesn’t know how to imitate a record scratching, a drunken slur of “come here,” leisured nineteenth century dandies.

the origin of queer is questionable. the origin of humor is Latin, umorem. it means fluid. all interrogative pronouns in Latin begin with “qu.” for example, quare. it means why.

words that rhyme with /kwɪ(ə)r/: here, fear, tear, smear, sneer, shear, sheer, sphere, appear, clear, cavalier, unclear, domineer, veer, veneer, revere, cohere, inhere, premier, near, leer, spear, sincere, mere, insincere, year, dear, engineer, auctioneer, cheer, severe, persevere, we’re.

something about “eer” is phonetically evasive. vowels in IPA get entirely new signs when followed by an “r.” “r”s are voiced consonants, slippery-close to vowels. the sound can be held out to theoretical infinity.

queer, like humor, embraces contradictions, celebrates paradox. both are masks for meaning. like mathematical functions, their meaning is their formal delivery/deliverance of content. (marxism is also an orientation-towards time.)

something about the word “queer” is syntactically troublesome. the category queer creates is not in fact correlated with a category itself. queer confounds. (queer is an orientation towards ontology-a polyvalence.)

/hjuːmər/

words that describe what queer can be: off-color, off-kilter, off, out; surprising, slippery, strange; curious, humorous.

always look at evasion as queering.