#Wegotthis: queer parrhesia in the register of parodic paranoia

Abstract

ABSTRACT Queer parrhesia is an activist mode of speaking truth to power that destabilizes dominant societal positions and their opposition. We develop this concept and illustrate one of its registers, parodic paranoia, through a close reading of the whistleblower and transactivist Chelsea Manning’s bid to run for U.S. Senate in the 2018 Democratic primaries. Hacktivism and transactivism, we show, constitute rhetorical manoeuvres by which Manning performs (as) a subject position that combines an ethics of paranoia with an aesthetics of parody to enact politics as unusual. Beginning from Manning’s parodic paranoia, we conceptualize queer parrhesia as an inherently transgressive political style and discuss its performative potential for dismantling current social orders and imagining less orderly alternatives. The productive potential of queer parrhesia, we conclude, can only be realized when the subject position of the parrhesiastes is put at risk, gaining strength from its performative vulnerability and, indeed, failure.