Here, Queer, and Paranoid! On Acrid Sociality and Collaborating Otherwise

abstract:The work required of politicized subjects to act together, across difference towards transformative justice, is inexhaustible, complex, and difficult. Sometimes it is a battle to speak to one's peers, let alone act in concert with them. This article addresses destructive tendencies of intracommunal queer relationality in particular. Recent events within queer networks have helped us to understand particular impasses in queer organizing as acerbic and self-destructive—what we term here as "acrid." In such instances, although some useful spaces for critique, criticism, praise, questions, wonderings, rants, reflections, and connections opened up, battlefields on which allied community members viciously attacked one another also manifested. Although generative at times, the debates and dialogues contained a great deal of vitriol, judgment, complacency, demands for apologies and annihilation, and in some instances, threatening and violent language, all which inhibit the momentum of our movements. This article is neither a content analysis of these myriad breakdowns in queer collaboration, nor are we interested in proving that such examples of destructive paradoxical relationality indeed happen. They happen. Instead, we assess the damage of devastated intracommunal relations, consider their queer propensities, and creatively theorize alternative possibilities for better collaborations throughout our queer spaces, communities, and futures.