Queer Praxis
Questions for LGBTQ Worldmaking
Edited By Dustin Bradley Goltz and Jason Zingsheim
Section IV: Questioning the Limits of Decorum: Strategies for Assimilation, Interrogation and Radical Transformation
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Section IV
Questioning the Limits of Decorum: Strategies for Assimilation, Interrogation and Radical Transformation
From the tensions of coalition, we move to explore the limitations and hegemonic workings of normative affects—socially acceptable expressions of emotion—particularly their intersectional collusions with whiteness and patriarchy. This section delves into the potentials and shortcomings of queered anger and queer decorum as alternative sites for queer political engagement. Suspicious of the disciplinary functions of calmed and institutionalized rationality, we process how the maintenance of decorum and the containment of anger can mask the symbolic and material violences that anticipate, vitalize, and fuel queer politics. Yet, we also examine how breaches of decorum and invocations of anger can function to both mobilize and/or erode support for queer political goals. Further complicating the role of these emotional expressions are the racialized and gendered histories and standpoints that inform their performances, embodiments, and receptions. Does queer resistance ever not violate normative affective registers? Is there such a thing as queered decorum? Is (queer) decorum always tied to normative assimilationist politics? Is there potential resistance in minimized affect? Is there queer love or a queer politic without anger? What are the temporal components of anger and decorum?
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