What is queer? How do we live it? Do we feel it? Have you ever thought about it? Eleven feathers tell their story, in an invitation to openness, inclusion and fluidity. An intimate text, but also, and forgive the cliché, terribly political.
11 short queer essays, collective published these days by Somme tout, brings together for the most part names unknown to the general public. Apart from Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay or Laura Doyle Péan, you won’t recognize many signatures here. It must be said that several have opted for a pseudonym (including dog food, yes, that’s its name), a choice that takes on its full meaning when reading these 150 pages of texts, sometimes in the form of a story, sometimes poetry, hard and moving at the same time, certainly destabilizing, which lift the veil on an unknown reality. Badly known.
It should be noted, and this is among other things what makes the originality of the work (apart from its purpose, it goes without saying), that the texts are often deliberately deconstructed. Tongue twisted. Revamped. Invented (just enough, but not too much). To confuse the reader, we understand, following the example of the oh so disorienting experience reported: this “dizzying feeling of being constantly in search of oneself”, as summed up by the director of the collective, Marie-Ève Kingsley, in a text felt like a manifesto.
Because being queer is a bit like that, she summarizes in an interview, met earlier this week. “A posture, she says, or a different relationship to the world. And if we don’t show it, people cannot understand the scope of this relationship to the world. »
Because who says queer says different, other, but in relation to what, exactly?
PHOTO MARTIN CHAMBERLAND, THE PRESS
Marie-Ève Kingsley, author and director of the collective 11 short queer essays
Society is organized according to sexual orientations. We have standardized ways of living. So when we are outside these norms, our relationship to the world is different.
Marie-Ève Kingsley, director of the collective 11 short queer essays
For example, with infinite sensitivity, Maël Maréchal recounts his sometimes “biological” and sometimes “mythological” organs. “I am a tree. Further on, Matéo Pineault poetically wonders about his transition: “Is he contaminating me or is he fleeing me? » No matter, « I become me ». “I float just above my body, in apnea. “On the question of the first name, Zed Cézard in turn confides: “I am finally called as I am” by telling this “miracle of giving birth to me”. Imagine living it. “I cried with happiness tearing my guts out. »
“Queer Liberation”
If the texts do not deprive themselves to denounce the ambient heteronormativity, the collective does not want to be a full-scale attack against all the cisgender heteros of this world (despite some arrows directed against the “heteronormative neoliberal patriarchal white supremacy” , this was to be expected). “We are not against cis or heterosexuals, continues Marie-Ève Kingsley, but we are against the fact that it is a norm and the only way to live. »
The preface, signed Anne Archet (pseudonym of an author well known in the queer milieu as an anarchist), also gives the tone, even the mission, to the book. From the very first sentence: “The world in which we live is made up of multiple hierarchical dominations […] is despicable,” she wrote. Basically, and allow us to summarize: if there is a future, “this future can only be queer”.
Bold? Certainly. The author, with a committed pen which we have certainly not finished hearing about, explains: the tight categories that we have socially constructed “alienate” us, she writes. All of us, collectively, heterosexuals like the others, are bullied by this “rigidity of gender roles and sexual mores”. Solution ? “The moral of this story is not only that heterosexuality must be destroyed, but also that queer liberation is for everyone. » An invitation to action, in inclusion.
11 short queer essays
Under the direction of Marie-Eve Kingsley
All in All Editions
146p.