Fucking Solidarity: queering concepts on/from a Post-Soviet perspective
Queering Paradigms VIIIUniversity of Vienna, Department for English and American Studies
20-23 September 2017
Summary
“The լղոզած treatment of QYC strikes me more as a convenient plugin,
reproducing the status quo of who can gaze at whom and how. I think your
observation regarding the excerpt from Viktor Shklovsky's "Гамбургский
счет" (1928) is absolutely perfect here: В Батуме зашел с товарищем в Женотдел. "Мы, женщины
Аджаристана," — диктовала белокурая женщина другой женщине, —
"протестуем против интервенции в Китае и против предательства" . .
.
(I went to the Women’s Department of the Communist Party
(Zhenotdel) in Batum with a comrade. "We, the women of Adjaristan," a
blond woman was dictating to another woman, "protest against the
intervention in China and against the betrayal")” (QYC and
Sargsyan 2017).[1]
In this presentation I
focus on a project titled “Բացա(հայ)տում In Flight: Singing Tricksters, Imposters,
Masqueraders” as a
decolonial practice of solidarity when an arts collective called the Queering
Yerevan Collective initiated a conversation with me as a researcher who in the
past had always initiated conversations and research with the Collective. This
was our way of practicing solidarity together in the face of decolonial
feminist-identified scholars’ cooptation of practices termed decolonial and their failure to
acknowledge fellow scholars and artists from the “Global South” as knowledge
producers.
By queering the
conventions of genre and authorship of knowledge production, and
(self-)critique, this collaborative project provides new openings for practicing
solidarity. For example, we abandon the claim of the interviewer as the author
of an interview-conversation and take flight in collective authorship. In our
interview-conversation project we experiment with form as a decolonizing
methodology. We use this conversation to also critique scholarly hypocrisy, at
the same time staying alert to the ease of slipping into the many disciplining
and norming systems we are working to unhinge and critique. Through our
engagement with each other, images and the three-language text we co-create we
make room for queering the forms, the genres, and the languages that solidarity
can take on, at the same time providing collective self-care: intellectually
and emotionally nourishing all of us involved in this practice.
“Is it possible to build a bridge without exploitation…?” asks
the QYC (QYC and Sargsyan, 2017). To which I say Yes, if I can “dream-travel into new imaginaries cutting across
linearity of disciplines, time, worlds, and realities through [this] bridge”
(QYC and Sargsyan 2017). “How to dismantle the world that is built to
accommodate only some bodies?" Ahmed asks [(2017:14)]. How to dismantle
the feminist-titled worlds that are built to accommodate only colonizing
bodies? I ask” (QYC and Sargsyan 2017).
I share our experience
of inclusive queering solidarity through a multi-genre performance, incorporating
my auto-ethnographic reflections, our (QYC and my) theoretical analysis of issues
such as decolonial feminism, naming as a feminist issue, and citation as
“feminist memory” (Ahmed 2017). I incorporate the images that the QYC took, as
they are part of our visions and critique and flight. I close my presentation
with a song to create the affective attunements that our own practice of solidarity
as an anti-hierarchical decolonizing practice makes possible.
[1] Viktor Shklovsky, The Hamburg Score, trans. S. Avagyan (Champaign, Illinois: Dalkey
Archive, 2017), 173.
References
Ahmed,
S. (2017). Living a Feminist Life.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Queering Yerevan and Nelli Sargsyan. (2017). “Բացա(հայ)տում in Flight: Singing Tricksters, Imposters, Masqueraders.” In ARTMargins
(February 11, 2017)
