I introduce myself in a threefold way: a loser, a dis-oriented person, and a trouble maker. When people call me / us names these become a second skin or even a thin or thick layer of sweat that we can decide to wash, take off, or wear with pride. I wear with pride these three names; it is not in vain that until recently my hairstyle was a rainbow flag in the form of a punk crest.
Loser was a name that I got when I was in my first year of my PhD in Barcelona. It was given to me by an American tourist when I told him what I did for a living and how old I was. He said I should be tenured by then and have a permanent position. I was at that time 37 years old and did not have any funding for my PhD. And yet, being a loser, living an alternative life to that of toxic discourses of success, has situated me in a privileged position. I can watch people struggling to get prestige, publications, balance between personal and professional life, sacrificing their children in the benefit of… What exactly? Money? Prestige? A car? A dog? A house? There is no right, no wrong, there are not successful ways of living or unsuccessful ones. There are only the subjects fighting to be themselves while subjected to objectivations by the toxicity of capitalist goals that are set against the personal, the intimate, our real desire.
I am a dis-oriented person both in my sexual orientation and in the ways I define family and community. I owe to Sara Ahmed, and her Queer Phenomenology, this way of thinking, which along with The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halberstam changed the way I am and I become. I like to get lost, it is only when deviating for the assigned – by whom exactly?- path that I am able to see and apprehend new perspectives, new ways of thinking, views of things that are unusual, perhaps because they are ugly- like some neighborhoods in Barcelona or London, perhaps because nobody really wants to go there, like a small town in the middle of nowhere in Iceland. I can get lost very easily when I skip planned research, and get lost looking for a reference, then a manuscript, then back to the original, the manuscript remains, informs me of temporalities and, specifically, of ways of staying with the trouble. I have learnt to live with these imperfections, and so I have learnt to live with other people’s ones. When I started reading Donna J. Haraway Staying with the TroubleI felt home. I felt I was doing good and not bad helping friends who are struggling with addictions, identities, money, or trying to fit into an emerging pattern of toxic masculinities in the gay community. Who is the most muscled? Who is the most beautiful? Who dresses better? Bullshit: Prince Charming is death and the queer activist cannot judge, be convinced by processes in which the Normative-Hegemonic Masculinity-Capitalism wants to assimilate and erase our true colors.
I am a trouble-maker. I have been accused of that by my ancientsupervisor, and my ancientcolleagues, by people who defined themselves as friends of mine but they were not able to send a message while I was very sick, being sexually harassed or more to the point, having troubles. You see, the trouble maker makes trouble as a response to trouble. That is what defines a queer activist whose voice is not an addition to the multitude of mechanically copied and humanly enhanced and performed behaviors that divide LGTBIQ+ communities. We might have our differences, but we might stick together.
In the 90s, I walked through Barcelona holding hands with my then-boyfriend. We were called names, had stones thrown at us, persecuted, told by a good number of servers not to show off: we were scaring customers away. I was being called queer all the time. Queer as in its original meaning of strange: Antonio’s son is queer, he has blue hair, he wears this and that… My understanding of queer is greatly indebted to these people, because I started to pay attention to every single use of queer. Three women living together were queer, a mother of a child who used to live in my same block was queer because his son had Downs syndrome and she – being alone and being a she – insisted in taking care of him instead of sending him away to an institution. Queer were the homeless people who gathered every night some blocks north to where I was living to sleep in the council shelter. Queer were the drug addicts in the parks. Queer was the hairdresser and the shop attendant in the bakery because they were trans, and they were married. What kind of man marries one of those things? Yes, the men were also queer. Queer was the child who did not play football, or the one who played with dolls, or the one who preferred to read that get involved in all the stupidity and normative and toxic myths that inform childhood. Everything other was and still is considered queer.All of this informs my understanding of queer studies, a theoretical frame I apply to Medieval Studies and Manuscript Studies.
I use the word ‘queer’ meaning ‘strange’ in order to free my argument from scripted identities, following thinkers and writers like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Lee Edelman, Laurent Berlant, Judith Butler, and Carolyn Dinshaw among others.
The focus of my research is sex but understood as an ideological genre. I treat sex not as encounters between partners for the reasons of pleasure or desire, but as a manifestation of affect and as affective relations that creates different genres that ‘represent narrative patterns that solidify over time into a recognizable body of forms with shared features’, breaking free of frames of ‘historically specific cultural discourses an ideologies’ (Tyson Pugh, Queering Medieval Genres,2004:1). I understand gender, in this context, not as a categorization of sex differences in humans determined by biology or genetics, an approach that perpetuates binary models, for example the one-gender model proposed by Thomas W. Laqueur. Henceforth, I refer to genders rather than gender, adapting Donna J. Haraway’s assumption that we inhabit a world with a response-ability for problems posed by humans, which, as a word deriving from homo,perpetuates ‘masculinist universals and their politics of inclusion’ which creates unbalanced dichotomies in which the powerless, trouble-makers, queer, losers, different are othered (Haraway,Staying with the Trouble : Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 2016: 11-12) .The predominant modern categories of heterosexual and homosexual further create binary oppositions imposing a set of historically and politically charged ideologies that collapse when other narratives emerge, like that of the bisexual or asexual person. If these modern categories define an orientation (sexual, political or cultural), then the impulse guiding this positioning post is to re-orient conceptions of genres, genders, and discourse by positioning myself as queer.
If sex is an ideological genre, this can only be researched through affect and affective operations. There are no manifestations of sex in the past, at least none that have not been manipulated, biased, labelled, stereotyped, or condemned. I do research because I am convinced that is the only way forward, every affective resonance and echoes that point towards alternative ways of bonding and forming communities.
In fact, the obsession with taxonomies and way of structuring knowledge, of parcelling time-periods, the calls for not being anachronistic has created a form of chrononormativity which align with that of Elizabeth Freeman’s definition of “the use of time to organize individual human bodies towards maximum productivity (…) through particular orchestrations of time.
(…) Schedules, calendars, time zones” (Time Binds, 2010: 3). I am freeing myself of any anachronistic guilt and I do use the terms homosexual, lesbian, bisexual and heterosexual in my research: not doing so further creates a veil of invisibility to a variety of ways of being and becoming that align with Hegemonic Masculinity. I do not care if the terms did not exist in the Middle Ages, as far as I know heterosexuality didn’t exist either and nobody questions its use.
The Middle Ages has been defined as “the age of the medium” (Hans Henrik Lohfert Jorgensen, The Saturated Sensorium, 2010:3) and I claim we need to involve queer theory, disability theory, transgender theory, intersectional theory in the study of this time period globally but without imposing western chronologies in other cultures and geographical areas. I aim to read and considerusefulall kinds of readings in my research even those that I don’t necessarily agree with. I do believe in having allies that are generous, do not invite themselves to exploit my knowledge, who do not play by the rules of academic toxic behaviors. There is plenty of that out there.
I am an activist and that informs and reinforces my research, which is as scientific as the one carried away by academics who do not want to position themselves politically or ideologically. I have taken many names before, and I am looking forward to wearing one thousand more; each of them helps me to get lost, to get anxiety, and I can take them all. Quoting Madonna’s “I rise”: I can’t break down now.
Playlist:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2qrZa04yGQaBmciKNUHzlJ?si=blRsxUUQRSebzA6SATGT0g
Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/es/playlist/positioning-queer/pl.u-83kyTNaMx0k?l=en
The Queer Unicorn 