Queering the Desire to Die: Access Intimacy as Worldmaking for Survival

ABSTRACT

Based on heightened suicide rates of LGBTQ+ people, in this essay I reclaim the desire to die as a queer desire in itself. This framework aims to demedicalize—and thus re-politicize—the desire to die as a “normal” response to living in societies of domination and violence against queer lives. Through this, I frame suicidal people as agentic beings who play crucial roles in systems of community healing in the face of compulsory vivation. Building on a strengths-over-deficits framing, I engage the disability justice concepts of access intimacy and care webs to explore queer relationality and worldmaking practices that offer alternative modes of living with the desire to die.

KEYWORDS:

• Access intimacy
• care webs
• compulsory vivation
• suicide
• queer worldmaking

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This spatial framing is not intended to endorse a linear model of sexuality or quantification of oppression. Instead, it gestures to hegemonic conceptions of heteronormativity wherein some bodies, identities, and performances are considered “more queer” than others (e.g., those who do not conform to cis/homonormativity, such as those who identify with transfeminine and T4T [trans for trans] terms).

2. I shift McRuer’s (2002) term from “ablebodiedness” to “ableness” in this work to honor the fact that able-normativities are not limited to the physical body. They also influence mental, emotional, and cognitive aspects of human life.

3. Notably, the DSM also medicalized and continues to medicalize queerness. This has resulted in violent reparative and conversion therapies including electroshock applications, icepick lobotomies, and chemical castration (Cohen, 2016; Dean, 2014).

4. The acronym BIPOC is used to “to highlight the unique relationship to whiteness that Indigenous and Black (African Americans) people have, which shapes the experiences of and relationship to white supremacy for all people of color within a U.S. context” (The BIPOC Project, 2020). Though this essay moves beyond U.S. contexts, I use this term to note the importance of contextualizing racial identities and their unique histories of oppression within Western/U.S. biomedical systems, particularly via slavery and colonization (see Washington, 2006).

5. In line with Price (2011), I use the term bodymind “to emphasize that although ‘body’ and ‘mind’ usually occupy separate conceptual and linguistic territories, they are deeply intertwined” (p. 240).

6. While the term “femme” was originally used to label feminine white lesbians, it has recently expanded to include people of various genders to describe queer feminine identification and performance as well as a political reclaiming of emotional labor (see Cecelia, 2016).

7. This term builds on the work of Price (2011), Morrison (2005), and Bradley Lewis (2006), all of whom aim to offer a term to honor people’s complex relationships with psychiatric care.

8. Seroquel is a brand-name form of quetiapine, a rarely-used antipsychotic medication prescribed for the treatment of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder.

9. Referencing Leelah Alcorn, a 17-year-old trans woman who died by suicide in 2014 by walking in front of a truck on Interstate 71 in Ohio. Upon coming out as trans, her parents sent her to a Christian-based conversion therapy program. The death announcement posted by her parents misgendered and deadnamed her.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.