Militarisms, Migration, Speculative Geology, and a Queering of Place

• In Event: 64.088 - Sheraton Roundtable 12 - Osgoode Ballroom
  In Roundtable Session: 64.088-2 - Storying Land, Consent, and Radical Relationality as Practices of Walking-With

Abstract

1. Objectives

This paper examines a walking research-creation event that explored the place of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Queering the format of a walking tour our research event included ‘pop-up’ lectures and artistic interventions into the name/place/concept ‘Lancaster.’ Approaching topics from a queer, feminist, Indigenous, and critical race framework, the walk takes up the place of Lancaster obliquely. Narratives and stories ranged from the Lancaster Bomber, the Lancaster Treaty, the Lancaster KKK protests of 1989, the Lancaster abolitionist movement, and the Sims speculum produced in Lancaster interrogating themes of militarism, migration, settler colonization, Black diaspora, free market capitalism, sinkholes and speculative geology.

2. Theoretical framework

The theoretical framework for this paper examines place from a queer and affective orientation. We use the word queer in several senses: to refer to sexuality and gender identities; to rupture biologically determined notions of reproduction and progress narratives; and as a tool for defamilarization (Browne & Nash 2010; Clare 2001, Halberstam 2005). We also work against reducing queerness to a form of exceptionalism, and the inherent Whiteness and privilege of queer transgression (Munoz 2010; Puar 2007). Mortimer-Sandilands (2008) argues that to queer the landscape is “to actively intervene in ideas and practices of nature (ecological and otherwise) in order to disturb its naturalizing and normalizing effects” (p. 458). Somerville (2016) takes up queer in relation to place as a strategy for research and writing. A queer method, she notes, disrupts and decenters the human, and emphasizes a new theory of representation. Somerville writes, “These moves that originate in the queer strategies that subverted the neat gender and sexuality binaries that structure heternormativity in the past are now applied to destabilize humanism’s structuring nature/culture divide and to attend to human entanglement in the fate of the planet” (p. 25). Analyzing the walking research-creation event as a queering of place demands that we think of the stories generated on the walk as “thick”. This thickness of place cannot be quantified and measured. Instead place becomes entangled, transcorporeal, and material. When we consider place as simply the site of our research, this approaches place from outside of the event, or after the event. In contrast, thickness demands a feltness of experience in the making.

3. Methods

The history and genealogy of walking is encumbered by the figures of the flâneur and the dérive, tropes, that Heddon and Turner (2012) argue invoke a fraternity that is predicated on autonomy, ability, Whiteness, masculinity, and as such a capacity to walk anywhere detached from the immediate surroundings. Cadogan (2016) in his essay ‘Walking While Black’ speaks to the ways that racism and privilege foreclose the possibilities that walking offers. Walking in urban spaces, he contends, means one has to contend ‘negotiating oppressions’. Our walking research-creation events complicate and rupture the White-cis-hetero-patriarchal canon of walking.

4. Significance

We are interested in how walking research-creation might inflect place with new figurations, in order to invoke a situated ethics that is accountable to queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour subjectivities and worlds.

Authors

• Stephanie Springgay, OISE/University of Toronto

• Sarah E. Truman, University of Melbourne