This thing of saying farewell to queer theory is, let’s say, to stop paying so many tributes to a Western thematic axis, which says what is queer, and what is not queer, and that there are queer ecologies… well, basta.
We are faced with writings that were created in a rupture, a rupture that affects us a lot because we are from a certain generation. And that even today, we live in these effects, echoes, reverberations of the generations of 68–69… and the following years. We, well, even if we were born in the 90s, I don’t know, we’re from that generation. So, we are involved in these devices, so…
And here I take up a concept started in the queer theory workshops, which was: “desire as a war machine”, which is the concept of Manada de lobas, with Leonor Silvestri in “Foucault para encapuchadas”. What’s going on is that these texts are machines, because they are produced in other machines, and that the methods or tricks, the hints that they give us to instrumentalise them against a regime that vampires us, that rots us, that is the value of queer theory! It’s not that “ah it’s queer” or “oh it’s not queer”, that’s not the important thing. What’s important is that it allows us to work on what I call the “ethics of difference or differentiation”, to uh… Well, on a very personal level, I believe much more, I wouldn’t say in “a radical separatism”…. not lesbian or I don’t know what eh… no, I don’t refer to that. But I do believe in a break with these ideas of a society… where, so I insist, where “the LGBT” is not seen as a “periphery” (like “the rest”, that “which is too much”), but rather that it is a part of the power that functions to “continue to normalise”.
I’m not saying that we should stop naming ourselves, to situate ourselves from there, or from “the woman” or feminisms. What I’m saying is that: if these things are performative, if it’s an act, if it’s something I do, if it’s a “doing”, then let’s work with these concepts, with these ideas, starting from “doing”, from “thinking how difference is constructed”, before looking for “subjects”, “queer subjects”, “women’s subjects”, “subjects” this, that. Well, subjectivities come and go, some are evanescent [gradually diminishing], others are very rigid, well. We advance by finding ourselves, and by working on these “subjectivities”, these concepts… but above all by antagonising. All queer theory is antagonistic… well, it emerged from antagonisms within a movement that seemed homogeneous, but which is not even homogeneous in dreams! So thinking from antagonism, antagonism, as productive. Antagonism is productive, that is, not killing each other, let’s see, but rather: factionalizing, to produce alliances. But yeah, that’s it haha! That’s all I have to say about “queer theory”, well, yeah, I’m already a bit exhausted, so now I’m even more exhausted about queer theory, but well, thanks a lot…
Translation Anonymous.
