User:Senka/special issue 3/pocket reader

Possible names of reader

• Tangents and anecdotes
• Walking with a pocket of questions
• Questions weighing my pockets down
• Questions of ... (and connect like a diagram)
• How technology worldbuilds?
• Routes
• Questions to walk with
• On my R(e)adar

Overarching topics/concerns

• questions of narrative, worldbuilding and fiction
• questions of the use of public space (bleja)
• questions of memory and trauma
• questions of gender and queer histories

How technology worldbuilds—among other things—gender (from the airport to the bedroom)

Perhaps as a preface I should say that I am talking about the notion of 'technology' as Ursula K. Le Guin has described it in 'A Rant About “Technology”'.

Its technology is how a society copes with physical reality: how people get and keep and cook food, how they clothe themselves, what their power sources are (animal? human? water? wind? electricity? other?) what they build with and what they build, their medicine — and so on and on.

and

Technology is the active human interface with the material world.

So here a technology is a an x-ray machine, as much as it is language itself, as much as it is a spoon or a sex toy.

At the airport

At the airport they decide who I am by clicking a button ✈, as a result of the texture of the fabric I wear, my hair style that day and how aggressively I claim my private space by spreading my arms around me.

✈ This machine, an x-ray in which the security personnel through a click of a button decide whether you are to be scanned as a 'man' or as a 'woman'. From Abigail Thorn I've heard this machine be referred to as the 'Penis Detection Machine' in her video essay 'Here's What Ethical AI Really Means'. This name really sizzles down to the fact that if you're for instance a pre-op trans woman, and the security click 'woman' the machine will register what it perceives as an 'anomaly' in your genital area. After that, you're supposed to get searched, and you're searched by the gender that they chose for you when clicking the x-ray scanner ('woman'->search->'woman' or 'man'->search->'man').

I've been checked by both male and female security, and the only thing I can say is, men are perceived as a bigger threat. They're more thoroughly searched.

Once I was let through border control to return to the European Union only to be called back a second later. The security insisted that I was not person I claimed I was, but they would let me go this one time. The technology used to produce my unforgeable id, my passport, cannot keep up with a constantly changing or transitioning body. The photo in it is static and meant to be changed only every 10 years or so (due to the belief that we humans cannot change so drastically in that time frame).✈
As a friend of my later remarked the t in trans stands for terrorist.

✈ Paul B. Preciado draws a parallel between migration and transition in 'Apartment on Uranus':

I will go so far as to say that it is processes of transition that best allow us to understand the political shift with which we are confronted worldwide. Sex change and migration are two practices that, by calling into question the political and legal architecture of patriarchal colonialism, of sexual difference and racial hierarchy, of family and nation-state, place a living human body inside the limits of citizenship, even of what we understand by ‘humanity’. Beyond the geographical, linguistic or corporeal movements which characterize both journeys, it is the radical transformation not just of the traveller, but also of the human community that welcomes or rejects the traveller. The ancien régime (political, sexual, racial) criminalizes all practices of crossing. But whenever the passage is possible, the map of a new society begins to be outlined, with new forms of production and reproduction of life.

I giggle to myself remembering that during my childhood and teenagehood, Serbia (the country I grew up in) was regarded as a country in transition. This was of course meant economically, transitioning from socialism to capitalism, or being a 2nd world country: in transition, in development.

It's curious how the profession I was trained for, graphic design, has played a vital role in establishing the visual standards of what counts as citizenship or a legible identity. Originating mostly in the design of money, coins and later paper money that could not be counterfeited, graphic design was crucial in designing administrative guidelines and standards. ✈

✈ Ruben Pater addressed this in the chapter Designer as Scribe of his book Caps Lock

For instance, you can get evicted if your payment is one day too late, or you can lose a job because you lose the hardcopy of a diploma, pr you can get arrested if you lose your passport. Measures that seem utterly nonsensical and inhumane on a social level, but are perfectly on line with administrative thinking. In that sense, graphic documents discipline our social behaviour to great effect.

✈ In 'Migration as Universalism' Boris Groys talks about migration as the most important and only universal political topic that the arts should be dealing with. Considering current proposed Dutch anti immigration policies, and larger European current of protecting European borders, what is seen as fortress Europe, I couldn't agree more.

Groys addressed that:

The main presupposition of the ideology of these parties is this: every cultural identity has to have its own territory on which it can and should flourish—undisturbed by influences from other cultural identities.

In other words: today the New Right uses the language of identity politics that was developed by the New Left in the 1960s–80s.

✈ So the New Right, completely disassociated from the fact that Europe as a continent has always benefited from numerous cultural influences. Furthermore, that many nation states have been built on multiple intersecting identities which, when you try to separate and compartmentalize them, you react havoc on both the people and the land. Here I guess I'm largely referring to what I've been told and can remember from the last stage of Yugoslavia falling apart into separate ethnostates. It's hard to separate people into borders when different ethnicities are so deeply enmeshed. And the belief that you should do that, usually results in genocidal actions.

Online

Groys also addresses the internet as a place which held grand promises in terms of public discourse, but ultimately got used by private corporations who've monopolized the sphere of public discourse on it:

Not so long ago the internet served as the main symbol and medium of globalization. Today, one is regularly reminded that the corporations and organizations that operate the internet have real, physical, off-line addresses in territories that are controlled by certain states. As such, they are increasingly used as instruments of surveillance, propaganda, and fake news. Instead of constituting a virtual space beyond state borders, the internet is increasingly understood as a scene of struggle for interstate information wars.

⯌ Borders unknowingly to most play a role online too. Not just in terms of geolocation and people being able to see different shows on Netflix, but also in terms of how state domains are formed or what Kaloyan refers to as 'baking borders into the internet', how and who is allowed to publish things online.

To the question of What happens when a country's domain name outlives it many answers in Kaloyan's research arise, in the case of the Soviet Union:

Not all domains of former countries have followed the same fate: .su, delegated to the Soviet Union just a year before its collapse, is still online. It’s now managed by the Russian Institute for Public Networks, who have found a variety of loopholes to circumvent ICANN’s termination proposals over the last thirty years. More than just a connection to the past, the domain for the Soviet Union has become a powerful digital symbol for Russia’s war narrative. The separatist Donetsk People’s Republic, an area of Ukraine illegally annexed by Russia and an unrecognized state, has used the .su extension for the website of its declared Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Because of .su’s lax usage policies, the domain has also become a haven for cybercriminals and white supremacists. While proposals to terminate .su have been around since 2003, discussions have quieted down in the past decade. The Russian Institute for Public Networks has sought to keep the domain operational, which continues to generate revenue through its over 100,000 currently registered addresses.

For any Slavic speaker, it might be obvious how the word domain includes the root dom (дом), meaning home. Yet when I look up the etymology of the word it leads me to the Latin dominus, meaning lord or master, or owner of the land. Hauntingly, it seems just the feudal etymology of the word signals to how this property will be used or misused. In it, we see continental disputes mirrored, memories of countries histories eroding, being artificially kept alive, or violently extinguished in the hopes that a new reality without any connection to it might arise.

In Yugoslavia's case, instead of preserving this domain as some kind of collective cultural memory, the domain was shut down as it were a fire hazard to the nation building effort of the current republics. Some analogies to things happening on the land of the countries are striking; such as companies trying to buy out the .me, the Montenegrin domain, because it will boost their brand appeal, same as the rich Russian elite is buying out Montenegrin land in order to turn it into luxury vacation housing.

In terms of gender there are of course some passing thoughts or questions I have, which pass by whenever I open a web page.
The ever-present awareness of one's own digital footprint, what one leaves online as a trace of who they are.
How closely do people curate their presence online, how they post in order to see the reactions of their digital twin, their own life looking back at them.
How this process, in terms of producing gender is aided by algorithmic facilitation, how aesthetic trends such as cottagecore, weirdcore, traumacore, as used to produce new identities online in order to keep you on the app longer. ⯌

⯌ Jreg and Joshua Citarella have talked about how Gen Z engages in identity play, or the ideas of having shifting and unstable identities, especially in terms of politics, trying on political identities as if they were different jackets or skins. I can't help but question for much of that was a current shaped by how online algorithmic facilitation works? And which features the platforms Gen-Zers are using are shaping this.

Not to mention, or even get into how the data that's been gathered on users enables targeted gender marketing...

In speech / On the page

The technology of each language builds gender anew. In English, I am ethereal and genderless, a gender neutral pronoun is afforded to me. While in a Slavic language I am whichever binary option I choose that day, confusing both the people that love me and hate me for it. ☎

☎ Feeling the constraint of my native tongue, Serbo-Croatian, I've been sitting on a proposal for a gender neutral option like a broody hen. Colloquially in the diaspora, Serbo-Croatian is called наш/naš (ours) because it encompasses more than these two languages (Bosnian, Montenegrin, Croatian and Serbian). This little signifier bridges the space of a former Yugoslav identity, and gives a name to a lack of a current identifier for people who share a (violent) history.

The way I was taught gender in language was in the order of importance:

• He spoke - On je progovorio
  
• She spoke - Ona je progovorila
  
• It spoke - Ono je progovorilo
  

Note: the verb leaves the trace of the speakers, the gender is always known. Information is always revealed. So my proposal was to work with omissions (or exist in them).

• They spoke - O' je progovoril'
  

Omit the information that reveals gender.

When mentioning this proposal to my mother, who's a proofreader, she noted that although all of our nouns are gendered with a preposition too, the word for pain can be both female or male; unlike all other words who are either one or the other, without the ability to switch.

taj bol, ta bol—тај бол, та бол

My friends, as accomplices, use language to produce or question gender best they can. ☎

☎ In the work Introducing Myself Ursula (K. Le Guin) [1] talks about how she is a man.

I predate the invention of women by decades.

So when I was born, there actually were only men. People were men. They all had one pronoun, his pronoun; so that’s who I am. I am the generic he, as in, “If anybody needs an abortion he will have to go to another state,” or “A writer knows which side his bread is buttered on.” That’s me, the writer, him. I am a man.

She contemplates on how she is a second-rate man, a poor imitation, as she does not fit the standard of what a man is, and speculates on what it might be like to invent the idea of an old woman, something that sits closer to who she might resemble. The essay does an awful good job of commenting on the status quo of gender at the time of writing it, the invisibility of women that flattens out into them simply never have been invented and sold as a concept in a convincing way.

It speaks to what I am addressing, as the existence of non-binary or gender-neutral or genderless or gender-nonconforming people simply is not present in naš, although the people were. So instead of a spiky critique, I want to build a language of emission that can acknowledge that we exist and are allowed to speak and be spoken of.

☎ In Turnabouts and deadnames: shapeshifting trans* and disabled vernaculars Ren Loren Britton talks about the multiplicity and vernacularity of trans stories. They address the issues with techno-fixes for trans problems, such as the plug-in for removing deadnames online. These solutions work all too well in a binary way, without being able to see if removing the deadname is fitting in such a situation, creating situations in which trans folks were almost outed, or signed their administrative papers with the 'wrong' name. Ren offers instead the possibility of accepting the state of many name in these different contexts.

☏ Pondering on these feature of point of view as well as the perspective it form, I wanted to create a short film from the POV of a lens out of focus. This lens would resemble how the world looks like to me while I am not wearing glasses, lenses or any other corrective technology for visual impairments. Similarly to a lack of language, a lack of vision informs a mode of being and existing. How you are perceived changes, details are eroded, there is a less information to contemplate on...

☏ Another project in the vein of perspective in storytelling is the Generative 3D web comic. This project would allow people to shift perspectives in a comic narrative until they assembled a full comic. Then they could print out the story they've assembled. The narrative would be different each time based on the assembler's actions. I feel like this project is necessary to do, just to show that narrative on a larger scale is not something we passively absorb (through our digital devices) but something we actively construct and participate in.

On the street

The technology of fabric does not build gender but builds how we perceive it. Reinforces stereotypes of what we expect the gender of the wearer to be, and those, oh well, those can always be played around with. ☼

☼ For far too long at this point, I've been doing drag, but exclusively at home. The indoctrination of the anti-queer sentiments from Serbia had their mark on me. I've internalised the idea that queerness is something that is allowed 'in your own four walls', despite being so visibly tarns at this point. To address this partially, I've thought of doing a project in which I interview old queer Slavic people in drag. I want to specifically interview them because of how unknown they are as a concept in eastern Europe. Queerness is seen as a western export, and not something that has existed in the region far longer than you and I have.

☼ I want to do conduct the interviews in different drag looks that the interviewee could decide on. They would essentially pick how I enter the space and who I become during the interview. I find this to be an interesting way of destabilizing the hierarchy that exists between interviewee and interviewer. The interviewee gains more agency, and might experience a playful shift in how an interview is conducted. ☀

☀ Vanity van Glow held this performative speech under the title 'In Defense of Drag' that both mesmerizing and entirely available on Youtube [2]. She basically responds to the reactionary current that claims that drag is something that children should not see or be influenced by and as such, outlawed in public space. She explains drag as a mirror to the way gender is conceptualized. Something that pokes fun at, entertainment with an undertone (or overtone) of critique.

☀ Renate Lorenz describes what she deems drag as:

If “I,” as Judith Butler has written (2004: 15), am always constituted through norms that I myself have not produced, then drag is a way to understand how this constitution occurs, and to reconstruct it on one’s own body. But at the same time, drag is a way to organize a set of effective, laborious, partially friendly, and partially aggressive methods to produce distance to these norms, for instance to the two-gender system, to being-white, to being-able, and to heteronormativity. In so (un)doing, drag proposes images in which the future can be lived. Drag, then, is fabricated by sets of bodily characteristics and actions. While it may indeed take on and thematize norms, it is nonetheless not restricted by them. The combination of fiction and documentary, of lies and claims, of reenactments and inventive experiments, and of conspicuously different bodily characteristics and artistic parts produces bodies that do not match up any dichotomies between “true” or “false” and “normal” and “other.” I would like to understand drag as an artistic work that, as Kathrin Sieg writes (2002: 2), “denounces that which dominant ideology presents as natural, normal, and inescapable, without always offering another truth.” The work of taking up distance is thus also a kind of sexual labor of desubjectification – a process that I see as central to practices of denormalization, and thus to queer politics.

She also coins the term radical drag, as drag which works with opposing gender markers to create confusion and disrupt the binary gender system. What Renate writes about is important not just to my practice, but to my being.

☼ With friend I wanted to make a zine on the relation of public and private. Precisely for us as queer Slavs, who live double lives in public and private space. Additionally, since they are still in the Balkans, we thought this would be a good way to lead a conversation between the diasporic and homeland. Zines can serve quite well as a way to have a dialogue, negotiate the space of the page, and make sense of our shared reality.

Facial recognition & surveillance
Can't imagine who in politics thought of criminalizing loitering, or just being outside in a group. In the Balkans the idea of loitering, hanging out or bleja is so integral to people's social life that putting and article and rules to it just makes no sense. Especially not policing public space by putting high frequency mosquito devices that ward off youth. Mayne activist have called this device a sonic weapon that targets youth, since the high frequency pitch can cause headaches, nausea, discomfort and can only be heard by people under the age of 25-30.

☼ To combat this, I've prototyped a device under the name of 'Fly on the wall'. It is meant to mimic how a mosquito works to cancel out its effects, and make room for youth to loiter without disruptions. With this device, liminal and other spaces fruitful for hanging out can again be freed up.

After all, public space is a space of shared communication, public discourse, and as such an equally political space. It is a space in which you can hang out, take to the streets protesting, or do a mixture of the two.

☀ Habermass, named this notion of a public space in which discussion of societal issues and politics happen—the public sphere.

Johana Hedva (the love of my life) pinpointed the issue in seeing only the public space as political space—access. Many crip, chronically ill, disabled people are often excluded from the public sphere, home-bound or bed-ridden. They ask the question of how do these people remain part of political discourse, how do they protest, how do the politics of their private lives seep into the public? Here, partially gender, but more so sex, plays an important part. Women are statistically more likely to be sick, ill or disabled, and as such, more likely to be excluded from the political ongoings of public life.

Public space or what constitutes the streets—the facades of the buildings or lack there of—are also a place of visible memory. I think of what I've grown up encountering as facades: graffiti as a visible discourse, murals of Serbian war criminals ☀, ruins that remained from the NATO bombing, purposefully left there as a remainder or persisting because of neglect, illegal construction projects that were busted and remain as a skeleton of a building, an idea without any proper permission to be executed.

☀ One such instance of seeing public opinion unfold, is the mural of the war criminal Ratko Mladić in Belgrade. Regarded by some as a war hero, they painted and tried desperately to uphold a clean appearance of this mural. Residents, activists and concerned citizens cleaned the wall of it, repainted it, threw paint on it, and were arrested for disturbing public peace because they threw eggs at it, yet the mural reappeared, and was redrawn by an elusive fascist group each time. People who proclaim a war criminal to be their hero might be in the minority, but they are a loud one. They are a minority which understand how to leave a trace and a mark on the city which will change how people perceive the city and their place within it. [3]

☼ One project that I wanted to make that came about from the erosion and neglect, or the visible history of a city, is a typeface based on a peeling font of a vernacular sign for a kiosk. I found it important to make this font, largely to archive a certain state of the city, a partially to question what fonts are supposed to be used for and why. Can a font not serve as memory?

☼ Tied to this project was the idea of starting a type foundry with my friends from the Balkans. One of the main reasons for it was our dissatisfaction with available fonts in the Cyrillic script(s). We had some fonts that supported both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabet, but not enough of experimental and whimsical fonts that speak to the current landscape of visual communication.

At the park / At the forest

☘ Estraven Lupino-Smith's Morality Cuts: Uncovering Queer Urban Ecologies addresses the the meddling of nations and government bodies to redefine what 'wild' is from untamed and frightening to untouched and tranquil, in an effort to build national myth. The execution and building of this myth in an urban context has been termed morality cuts by Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau. They literally cut down trees and bushes to prevent “perverts and alcoholics” from using the park.

These same "wild" spaces are often used as cruising spots for queer people, and are being perceived as frightening for a heteronormative crowd.
I've grown up in a post-industrial zone next to the largest forest in the city, abandoned factories, and the nature reclaiming all of that concrete, were the norm. These spaces were later taken up by groups that exist on the margins of society—in every meaning of the word: strays.
All the time I spent during the night in the forest I would encounter mostly either stray dogs or people who are often a bit too fearful of going about their doings during the daylight. Predominantly queers, addicts..

I have come to realize that some of the places where urban coyotes can thrive without detection and queer folks can hook up are the same. We share these spaces because they both need the wild within the city. It’s a wild that exists in the places and spaces that are liminal, nestled in-between the order of the developed urban landscape.

Through this conception, the woodlots, brownfields, and the public park are an extension of settlement, not the absence of it. They are defined as wild because of the colonial notions about space. Leisure and the way nature is to be interacted with is designed, with particular ideas about what the outcome should be. The public park is also a place of powerful imaginaries about land and nation. Canada as a nation markets parks and the great outdoors as part of its identity. The very establishment of space as a park is a part stripping the wild from it. When the peaks of mountains are a place to ski and enjoy vistas, the wild is tamed into something that is mobilized for a settler imaginary.

I guess whenever I walk through the forest at night I am surprised by:
a) How easy it is to think that you know a forest just because you have walked through it during daylight
b) How easy it is for me to feel safe in it, despite being raised with the notion that afab people are unsafe outside during the dark. I guess in some ways I never assumed that statement applied to me.
c) How I am not the only one who feels safer when there is less chance they can be perceived.

At the hospital

In some cases, although not my own yet, gender is produced by the technology of medication, HRT (hormone replacement therapy). In which trans and cis folk receive treatment in which ever direction of gender they want to head in. This process is admittedly way easier for cis folk. The moment a woman has three hairs on her chin and higher testosterone she is offered a way to "fix all of that", while trans folk wait for months, years, lifetimes.
I think hard about whether I want to allow my test results to be used for medical research. To allow practitioners to have more information about people like me—who have grown a tad bit different—and have hormonal differences; or to resist the shareability of the surveillance of my body and the feeling of being a 'lab rat'?
The medical industrial complex produces and unravels gender with each visit. When encountered with ambiguity, historically it has tried to fix the gender ambiguous body to fit into one of two proposed categories, ignoring all others that have a right to exist. To some degree this is the epicenter, along with the study of biology, that have together constructed the categories of sex and gender. ☠

☠ Johana Hedva in their essay 'In Defense of De-Persons', has pointed out that even personhood, or who constitutes a person, has been defined by institutions that comprise the medical industrial complex, mainly the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and APA (American Psychiatric Association).

The concept of the “person” that has been defined, deployed, policed, and immured by universality is one that promises self-determined completeness, wholeness, and power. In other words, that which can be both mastered and the master. A defence of a de-person could be said to be an embodiment of incompleteness, a demonstration of bad thinking, a performance of un-comprehension, a refusal of mastery at all.

They elaborate on how the same active agent (the state) that decides who constitutes a person, is the same agent who creates the conditions for people to become de-persons. They go on to ask:

My main question here is: for those who are not, for those who have emerged in relationship to rather than via self-determination, for those who are particular and sometimes nowhere rather than universal, for those in the undercommons, for us “invisible theorists” and for us “no-bodies,” how does the affirmation of de-person-ness offer a new form of political agency?

In the archive

Which histories are included in the archive, and which protocols decide this?

⎘ When I was reading the Gender Accelerationist manifesto quite some few years back I was delighted to learn about the different systems of gender and relating to it that exist in different cultures. Little did I know then that even in my own region and different gender system than that of the western binary one existed and in some mountains still exists.

⎘ In the mountainous region of Montenegro, Albania and the south of Serbia, exist virdžine. Men born female, who have lost the patriarchal head of their family, usually their father, and have sworn to be virgins in order to take on the role of a man. They go on to live as men in every aspect of their life. They're a byproduct of a history of patriarchy, specifically a family's need to have a patriarch in order to do things. There are virdžine that have said they regret not being able to live life as women, and ones that feel that they have been men for as long as their oath is old.

The technologies of documentation have a say in how they form historical narrative. Simply because how long they last and how durable they are is a deciding factor in whether or not they will be in the archive. For example, digital film is put back on tapes and stored in the national film archive of the Netherlands, simply because it is considered more durable than any hard drive. This of course means that some materials and formats are more likely to be preserved, while other resist this preservation.
No documenting technology is exhaustive, and it always captures an aspect, and never the thing in its entirety.
Due to the nature of how archives have been conceived and for whose benefit, they will always have gaps, especially when they represent or display a dominant narrative or the narratives of those who have had the means and the technologies to document.

⎘ Saidiya Hartman's method of critical fabulation searches for loopholes in oppressive archival structures and dares to imagine otherwise, an alternative. It is comprised of archival material, historical narrative and speculative fiction and has most thoroughly been described in Venus in Two Acts and Intimate History Radical Narrative.

In one of the talks I listened to, Saidiya also described how does she go about shifting the power dynamics through her writing. Because many times, she'll encounter these archival material that are filmed, recorded and preserved by the white gaze. So she gave the example of an image of girl on a balcony that was taken. Instead of narrating from the perspective of the photographer, she will narrative from the perspective of the girl observing the camera man. By doing so she destabilizes who is perceived and observed.

Recalling a talk with a friend about Hartman's work since she's reading Lose Your Mother now, and she brought up this quote from Saidiya that stuck with me:

If the past is a country, I am it's citizen.

⎘ Carmen Maria Machado in Dream House, chapter Dream House as Prologue refers to Saidiya's writing:

In her essay "Venus in Two Acts," on the dearth of contemporary African accounts of slavery, Saidiya Hartman talks about the "violence of the archive." This concept—also called "archival silence"—illustrates a difficult truth: sometimes stories are destroyed, and sometimes they are never uttered in the first place; either way something very large is irrevocably missing from our collective histories. The word archive, Jacques Derrida tells us, comes from the ancient Greek ἀρχεῖον: arkheion, "the house of the ruler." When I first learned about this etymology, I was taken with the use of house (a lover of haunted stories, I'm a sucker for architectural metaphors), but it is the power, the authority, that is the most telling element. What is placed in or left out of the archive is a political act, dictated by the archivist and the political context in which she lives. This is true whether it's a parent deciding what's worth recording of a child's early life or—like Europe and its Stolperstine, its "stumbling blocks"—a continent publicly reckoning with its past. Here is where Sebastian took his first fat-footed baby steps; here is the house where Judith was living when we took her to her death. Sometimes the proof is never committed to the archive—it is not considered important enough to record, or if it ism not important enough to preserve. Sometimes there is a deliberate act of deconstruction: consider the more explicit letters between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, burned by Hickok for their lack of discretion. Almost certainly erotic and gay as hell, expecially considering what wasn't burned ("I'm getting hungry to see you") The late queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz pointed out that “queerness has an especially vexed relationship to evidence. . . . When the historian of queer experience attempts to document a queer past, there is often a gatekeeper, representing a straight present.” What gets left behind? Gaps where people never see themselves or find information about themselves. Holes that make it impossible to give oneself a context. Crevices people fall into. Impenetrable silence. The complete archive is mythological, possible only in theory; somewhere in Jorge Luis Borges’s Total Library, perhaps, buried under the detailed history of the future and his dreams and half dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934. But we can try. “How does one tell impossible stories?” Hartman asks, and she suggests many avenues: “advancing a series of speculative arguments,” “exploiting the capacities of the subjunctive (a grammatical mood that expresses doubts, wishes, and possibilities),” writing history “with and against the archive,” “imagining what cannot be verified.”

⎘ Renate Lorenz's Queer Art: A Freak Theory has already popped into my head while being on the streets, but it is equally as important in the context of archives. Her description of the photograph of the beaded lady Annie Jones, who was part of the freak shows at the end of the 19th century and who sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld cited in 1933 as an example of gender deviance. Renate goes on to posit what queer practices offer in terms of viewing history from an othered perspective.

In order to develop an alternative discourse of difference, it seems necessary to me to claim the historical treatment of difference as the starting point for reworking it today, rather than understanding the histories of exclusion and violence as past and overwriting them with images of happy self-empowerment or with discourses of integration, tolerance, and “gay pride.” It is a matter of taking up moments of queer practice which, according to Douglas Crimp (2002), counter current movements of homogenizing, normalizing, and desexualizing. This reference to a history of exposure is nonetheless a risky kind of politics, for it means summoning up this history once again and giving it a new presence. At the same time, such a politics demands viewing this history from another perspective, proposing it as “other” in a way that seems to make possible a utopian approach to difference: one that tackles the problem of perhaps not being able to come to terms with the experience of violence and exclusion made historically in the context of the freak show.

⎘ Dubravka Ugrešić's The Confiscation of Memory focuses on the context of memory in the 'former East' with Yugoslavia as the main backdrop, but addresses far more than just this region. It really situates trauma in memory in these regions that have had a very different and difficult history. It addresses the meanings of being born in one country, growing up in another and living in a third while never changing location (I was born in the Yugoslav federation, raised in Serbia and Montenegro, and left just Serbia). Dubravka goes on to write:

Things with a past, particularly a shared one, are not as simple as they might first appear from the perspective of the collector. In this ‘post-communist’ age it seems that ‘Easterners’ are most sensitive to two things: communality and the past. Everyone will first maintain that his post-communism is different, implying at the same time his conviction that life in his post-communism is closer to that of the Western democracies than that of the other (post-communist) countries. The ‘Easterner’ is reluctant to admit his post-communist trauma in public, nor does he have the will to try to articulate it. He has had enough communist traumas (he holds the copyright on them, too), but they have worn out, aged, and don’t seem to hurt any more. The cursed ‘homo duplex’, mentally trained to separate his private life from the collective, weary of the constant ideological pressure to live facing towards the future, exhausted by the excessive amount of ‘history’ he has experienced, frightened by memories that keep popping up from somewhere, at this moment the ‘Easterner’ would most like to sink into the compliant and indifferent present, at least that’s how it seems. It is only the younger and more honest of them, like the (former) East German playwright Thomas Oberlender, who will exclaim out loud, ‘Why, I have two lives and one biography...!’

⎙ A project I want o make closely related to this, is a web oracle based on my doll pioneer girl keychain from former Yugoslavia. The keychain I have is becoming more and more eroded as I carry her along with me: she is a testament of a rapidly disappearing history. The digital oracle version of her, once clicked on or asked a question, would spill out a real or fictional fact about former Yugoslavia.

In the media

Talks about technology build gender too. Some of us are far too familiar with the act of assigning gender to technology, all the female service robots, the most notorious ones being Alexa, Sophia, and Siri. Or all the representation of robots as being genderless and sexless, as they are exempt from reproduction, unlike humans.
On the other hand, aliens and robots are often the only ones allowed a genderless marker in popular media (list examples)
I think to my partner telling me how Polish kids now, at the ripe age of entering primary school, are using gender as an insult. Much like gay was prior used to denote bad, lame, just really unfavourable in general. Then, this was a phenomena that arose in English-speaking societies or cultures. Yet, this is really the so-called rotten West import of the word gender. The word for gender in Polish is płeć or rodzaj, in Serbian rod, yet both of these Slavic languages are treating the notion of gender as something foreign and laughable. Something the West brought in for them to ponder over and ultimately ridicule.

✉ In her book The Left Hand of Darkness Ursula K. Le Guin describes what would be considered in todays terms a non-binary or gender-fluid society of aliens. The reference is interesting for it's use of a change of perspective, or the possibility to see a version of our future society through the lens of an alien one. This society, which has a completely different approach to both gender and reproduction, sees the human investigator as strange at best, pervert at worst.

Of course, as Korzybski posited 'the map is not the territory' or in this case 'the media representation is not real life'. But in realities such as these where people spend so much screen time engaging with representation rather that 'real life', the critical questions that befall on what kind of representation there is are not to be overlooked.

In the bedroom

The bedroom is a place of rest, sanctity, sleep. But the bedroom is a place where gender exists in a private and public context. Sex toys, technologies which are produced to exist in a mostly private context, are often made from silicone, a pollutant whose production ultimately queers the body, not just through the use of them, but through how they're fabricated.

☾ In 'Toxic Progeny: The Plastisphere and Other Queer Futures', Heather Davis talks about a non-reproductive and ultimately queer future we are heading towards. It's an essay that really stabs you in the eye because: when Alex Jones said that the water is making the frog gay, he wasn't wrong. But even a broken clock is right twice a day. He failed to elaborate on why this is happening, how the hormonal structure of frogs is rapidly changing because they absorb so much through their skin, and the influence of microplastics is slowly queering their hormonal balance, making them less interested in hetero-reproduction. This is happening to humans too, just on a slower, less visible scale. Heather here calls un us to learn from queer people how to navigate this kind of future as a society.

On a maybe even more private level, fiction and our ability to use imagination also shape how we conceive of gender.

☾ Carmen Maria Machado's fictional story 'Mothers' conceives of the opposite premise Davis is departing from; that queer futures can be reproductive. In 'Mothers', a lesbian discovers that unbeknownst to her, she had a baby with her wife biologically. It seems that no one besides her is surprised by this. She lives in a reality in which gender, and the meaning of it, is not much different that what she was used to, apart from the fact that two women can have a biological child together.

What would then a queer technology be?

☆ A disobedience device?

☆ A current that misbehaves and bends out of shape? Generalization are pointless, but let's walk with this question.

The neighbours I encounter on this walks

• Johanna Hedva
  
• Renate Lorenz
  
• Paul B. Presciado
  
• Ren Loren Britton
  
• Leslie Feinberg (maybe)
  
• Ursula K Le Guin
  
• Carmen Maria Machado
  
• Dubravka Ugrešić
  
• Saidiya Hartman
  
• Kaloyan Kolev
  

Who I might have strayed away from.. for now

• my friend Rade
  
• Mindy Sue
  
• Legacy Russels
  
• CJ the X
  

Questions for neighbours

How close do they live to me?
What is the proximity?
What kind of neighbour are they?

Referencing

Thorn, A. (2023) ‘Here's What Ethical AI Really Means’, Philosophy Tube, Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaU6tI2pb3M.
K. Le Guin, U. (1969) ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’, Ace Books.
K. Le Guin, U. (1992) ‘Introducing Myself’, https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/myl/IntroducingMyself.html.
K. Le Guin, U. (2005) ‘A Rant about "Technology"’, https://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-rant-about-technology, The Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation.
Hedva, J. (12.3.2022) ‘Sick Woman Theory’, https://topicalcream.org/features/sick-woman-theory/, Topical Cream.
Hedva, J. (10.6.2016) ‘In Defence of De-persons’, https://gutsmagazine.ca/in/, Guts, Issue 6: Futures , Lives , Politics.
Lorenz, R. (2012) ‘Queer Art: A Freak Theory’, The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, transcript Verlag, Bielefeld.
Presciado, P. B. (2019) ‘An Apartment on Uranus’, Fitzcarraldo Editions, translated by Charlotte Mandell.
Britton, R. L. () ‘Turnabouts and deadnames: shapeshifting trans* and disabled vernaculars’, .
Machado, C. M. (5.11.2019) ‘In the Dream House’, Serpent'S Tail.
Machado, C. M. ‘Mothers’, http://interfictions.com/motherscarmen-machado/, Interfictions Online, Issue 4.
Ugrešić, D. (2004) ‘The Confiscation of Memory’, , https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/people/dr_myka_tucker-abramson/postsocialistreadinggroup/dubravka_ugresic_the_confiscation_of_memory_nlr_i_218_july_august_1996.pdf, Hrvatsko Društvo Pisaca, Issue 1-2, pp. 167-176, translated by Celia Hawkesworth.
Hartman, S. (2021) ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Cassandra Press.
Hartman, S. () ‘Intimate History, Radical Narrative’, .
Artchad, Jreg. (14.6.2024) ‘Joshua Citarella Re-radicalizes Us’, ‘Horse Shoe Theory’, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVEdQbUmcM8&list=PLjEV6KRxNq9UIKlpW5ylk4Mh-8bxu-uVX&index=129.
Pater, R. (2023) ‘Designer as Scribe’, ‘Caps Lock’, Valiz, pp.25–52.
Davis, H. (5.2.2015) ‘Toxic Progeny: The Plastisphere and Other Queer Futures’, Philosophia Journal.
Kolev, K. (19.10.2023) ‘Yugoslavia’s Digital Twin’, https://www.thedial.world/issue-9/yugolsav-wars-yu-domain-history-icann, The Dial, Issue 9: Weapons.
Bogdanović N., Urosević P., Heil, A. (10.11.2021) ‘Graffiti War: Battle In The Streets Over Ratko Mladic Mural’, https://www.rferl.org/a/serbia-mladic-mural-protests/31555357.html, RadioFreeEurope, RadioLiberty
Flores E., Storm, V. (4.24.2019) ‘Gender Accelerationist Manifesto’, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/vikky-storm-the-gender-accelerationist-manifesto, The Anarchist Library.

For a full reading list with comments and quotes, go to ☛ Notes, Thoughts, and Annotations