Homonostalgia: Queering the archive through speculative composition

• In Event: Trans-Queering the Repair Train: Performing Research as Remedy

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
In this performance, the authors activate the concept of homo-nostalgia to indicate the twin pull of nostalgia towards both homogeneity and (homo)normativity. Our present educational epoch is marked by cis-hetero and white supremacist nostalgias. These normative nostalgias proliferate trans-antagonist and queer-phobic violence, and close down discussions of racial justice and injustice. Drawing on Cvetkovich’s (2003) notion of queer archives of feeling, we discuss data from several arts-based research projects, including in-school cultural productions with youth and kindergarten classrooms, and our own practice-based research. We argue that, despite our best efforts to create a queer counter-mythology (ANONYMISED, 2023) towards a more optimistic future, across our projects we find the pull of nostalgia towards normativity nearly impossible to resist.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
The archive, as conceptualised by Derrida (1995), is a repository of culture and knowledge. LGBTQI+ (Halberstam, 2002; Edelman, 2004), racialized (Pickens, 2019) and dis/abled (Kafer, 2013) people, their histories, and their futures are excluded from the archive. As Derrida (2002) notes, the archive is not “simply a recording of the past, but also something which is shaped by a certain power, a selective power, and shaped by the future, by the future anterior” (p. 40). As an intervention into archival logic, Cvetkovich (2003) outlines how queer archives of feeling are “composed of material practices that challenge traditional conceptions of history and understand the quest for history as a psychic need rather than a science” (p. 268). Following Cvetkovich, our paper discusses how speculative writing as an artistic and methodological worlding practice might rupture the logic of the archive through voicing different interpretations and propositions of the past, and future.

Methods
We worked with participants in three different arts-informed milieu: a linguistically diverse but economically-deprived Kindergarten classroom; grade 9 classrooms; and together for the last nine years as teacher-researchers. The compositions took the form of songs, poems, and prose that conceptualized different future-pasts. As queer artists, researchers, and educators, we embed our practice in literature focused on speculative archives as sites “for imagining other, possibly queerer, worlds” (Luciano and Chen, 2015, p. 188) and as qualitative researchers acknowledge that we have a “response-ability for the [speculative] world-making we participate in” (ANONYMISED, 2019. p. 32). Although the compositions are ‘speculative’ they are still ‘real’ and have material effects on both the authors and readers.

Data sources, evidence, objects, or material
Data sources include several speculative compositions by Grade 1 children, Grade 9 Literature students, and from our own creative song-writing performance-practice.

Significance
Amidst a global rise in racist, ableist and queerphobic hate (e.g. Marsh et al., 2019), ‘queer’ speculative interventions in the form of creative writing and sonic composition offer students, teachers and researchers a conceptual output to propose a more just world. The findings of this paper will benefit teachers and researchers interested in curriculum reform and inclusive education, as well as the transformative dimensions of creative practice in education settings.

Authors

• Presenter One, Presenter

• Presenter Two, Presenter