Mapping Queer Relationalities: An Exploration of Communication at the Edges of Cultural Unintelligibility

ABSTRACT

Focusing on queer relationality, broadly conceptualized as minoritarian subjects’ modes of relating, engaging, and connecting with others in a symbolic and material landscape of erasure and cultural unintelligibility, this special issue highlights their communication practices and relational experiences. In so doing, it attempts to mitigate epistemic injustice, a wrong perpetrated against minoritarian subjects in their capacity as knower and legitimate source of their own experiences, by making their practices and experiences known and legible in mainstream heteronormative culture. The purpose of our article is to offer a preliminary mapping of queer relationalities, ranging from communication practices to modes of sociality and relational formations that exist at the edges of mainstream cultural unintelligibility. To do so, we first explore the vast domain of queer relationality. Next, we identify and examine multiple ways of thinking, doing, and imagining queer relationality. We conclude with a discussion of theoretical, methodological, and political implications of current work on queer relationality assembled in this issue and explore future directions for research.

KEYWORDS:

• Communication
• cultural intelligibility
• epistemic justice
• normative violence
• queer relationality
• sexual minorities
• unintelligibility

[For minoritarian subjects, there is] a vast lifeworld of queer relationality, an encrypted sociality, and a utopian possibility.

–Jose Esteban Muñoz (2009, p. 6)

A recurring preoccupation with intelligibility … is best understood as a concern with the everyday labor of making sense of oneself and of making sense to others. [This] should be understood less as a desire to be recognized and accepted by society on society’s terms, and more as a desire to confront … “epistemic injustice”—injustice that affects people in their capacity as knowers and as community members worthy of being known.

–Ernesto Javier Martínez (2013, pp. 13-14)

Minoritarian subjects, such as sexual and gender non-normative people living under the regime of heteropatriarchy, have developed and practiced different ways of relating, engaging, and connecting with others that are largely unintelligible in the mainstream cultural imagination (Muñoz, 2009; Yep, 2017, 2020). Although these practices and communication activities serve multiple purposes, including survival and connection, they can also produce and maintain marginalization, shame, and erasure through unintelligibility—schemas that establish the domains of the knowable and unknowable in a culture (Butler, 2009). Cultural unintelligibility creates and perpetuates epistemic injustice, a wrong perpetrated against minoritarian subjects in their capacity as knower and legitimate author of their own experiences (Martínez, 2013). In particular, two forms of epistemic injustice—hermeneutical injustice and testimonial injustice—are produced through unintelligibility (Fricker, 2007; Martínez, 2013). According to Fricker (2007), hermeneutical injustice occurs when there is a lack of interpretive resources and frameworks to make sense of certain social experiences (e.g., lack of vocabulary for talking about queer relationality) and testimonial injustice arises when prejudice deflates the credibility of the minoritarian speakers (e.g., people with normative sexuality discredit the experiences of sexual minorities or ignore queer forms of relating and connecting). As an academic enterprise focused on exploring, examining, and understanding diverse ways of relating, engaging, and connecting, the field of communication and related disciplines appear particularly suited for studying queer relationality and to mitigate the unending epistemic injustice perpetrated against sexual and gender minoritarian subjects. Unfortunately, the communication discipline, at the present historical moment, has largely neglected, in Muñoz’s (2009) words, the immense and dynamic “lifeworld of queer relationality” (p. 6). The purpose of our special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality is to explore this vast lifeworld of modes of relating, engaging, and connecting by proposing a preliminary vocabulary and potential sense making mechanisms to register the experiences and relational formations of minoritarian subjects. As such, our project represents an initial step in the amelioration of hermeneutical and testimonial justice by enhancing the cultural intelligibility of queer relationality in multiple sites at this historical moment. In particular, the essays in this special issue explore the theoretical, methodological, and political potential of queer relationality in communication studies and beyond.

To begin our exploration, our article offers a preliminary mapping of queer relationalities, ranging from communication practices to modes of sociality and relational formations that exist at the edges of mainstream cultural unintelligibility. To do so, we first explore the vast domain of queer relationality. Next, we examine multiple ways of thinking, doing, and imagining queer relationality. Finally, we discuss the theoretical, methodological, and political implications of current work on queer relationality assembled in this issue and conclude with an exploration of future directions for research.

The vast domain of queer relationalities

As different ways of relating, engaging, and connecting under regimes of heteropatriarchy, queer relationality represents an embodied, material, symbolic, and political world of potentialities and possibilities—some of which have been enacted and actualized while others have yet to emerge (Muñoz, 2009; Yep, 2020). As such, queer relationality can be viewed as a fluid, expansive, and open territory for exploration, including its definitional parameters (Yep, 2017). In this section, we provide a sketch of the general features of queer relationality, explore cultural intelligibility and unintelligibility, and discuss power and the politics of unintelligibility.

Queer relationality is a complex constellation of phenomena arising from individual and collective responses to cultural practices, symbolic and material systems, and social structures associated with heteropatriarchy in a particular historical and geopolitical context. Offering a preliminary conceptualization to encourage further exploration without foreclosing its unseen possibilities, Yep (2017) proposed that queer relationality encompasses multiple domains, including:

• Modes of recognition and ways of seeing (e.g., knowing that another person might be sexually non-normative).

• Systems of intelligibility and frameworks of interpretation (e.g., recognizing actions and expressions as queer).

• Cultural expressions and linguistic utterances (e.g., using the expression “we are family” to affirm queerness in a group).

• Affective articulations and emotive interactions (e.g., expressions of subtle tenderness between two men in public).

• Encrypted sociality and coded relations (e.g., a knowing glance of acknowledgment between sexually non-normative subjects).

• Embodied relations and somatic connections (e.g., a subtle intimate touch between strangers).

• Forms of belonging and affinity patterns (e.g., queer support networks).

• Community formations and collective arrangements (e.g., a family of “choice,” consisting of friends, ex-partners, neighbors, etc.).

• Collective histories of oppression and memories of marginalization and suffering (e.g., group experiences of disenfranchisement and pain).

Although these domains circulate outside of the intelligible world of heteronormativity, they are frequently in relation to it. These domains are improvisational, creative, and adaptive as sexual and gender minoritarian subjects navigate a social world that was not designed for them. Further, queer relationality entails two spheres—intimacy and desire. Intimacy, ranging from fleeting and temporary to enduring and lasting, involves

• Feelings of closeness and connection.

• Deep knowing and understanding.

• Mutual attunement.

• Sensuality and eroticism.

Desire, ranging from internally experienced to externally articulated, includes

• Wishes and aspirations.

• Longings.

• Needs and wants.

• Affinities and attractions.

• Yearnings.

Taken together, this initial conceptualization of queer relationality opens up a vast landscape of social phenomena for recognition, exploration, and understanding that have been erased, neglected, ignored, or deemed unimportant in the mainstream cultural imagination. To put it another way, queer relationality, challenging epistemic injustice for minoritarian subjects, attempts to make these subjects’ lives recognizable and valid, in Foucault’s, 1990) words, by “the grid of intelligibility of the social order” (p. 93).

Cultural intelligibility, according to Butler (1999), refers to the production of a normative framework that establishes and authenticates who can be recognized and regarded as a legitimate subject in a particular society. A legitimate subject is one who is visible, one whose subjectivity is deemed as “proper” and “real” according to normative cultural logics, and one whose life is understood as both recognizable and valuable in a culture. A legitimate subject has a life that matters and lives a life that is considered a life (Butler, 2009). A normative framework that produces such a legitimate subject is the “heterosexual matrix” (Butler, 1999, p. 9). In this framework, a sequence of idealized relations between sex, gender, and desire is generated to produce cultural intelligibility and proper personhood. By positing that desire follows naturally from gender and gender follows naturally from sex, heterosexuality is constructed and continuously reified to appear “normal” and “natural” in social relations. More specifically, the heterosexual matrix presents sex as a natural substance that finds gender expression through femininity (for women) and masculinity (for men) in automatic binary fashion where femininity is expressed in sexual desire for her “opposite” (a man) and masculinity is manifested in desire for his “opposite” (a woman). Through heteronormativity, or the normalization of heterosexuality, the matrix creates, maintains, and perpetuates certain subjects as legitimate and coherent (Butler, 1999; Yep, 2003). A heterosexual woman or man has social, legal, and political validity and power (Butler, 1999). Society and culture are built for them.

The production of legitimate subjects simultaneously creates individuals and groups that are deemed unrecognizable and unintelligible in a culture. A lesbian, whose sex, gender, and desire line up differently from the heterosexual matrix by sexually desiring another woman, might be viewed as “unnatural” and not a “proper” woman in a number of cultural contexts. Similarly, a transwoman, whose gender performance troubles the heterosexual matrix by calling into question, at the very least, the relation between sex and gender, is not a viable subject—that is, recognizable and “real”—in various social institutions, systems of representation, and social structures. Cram’s (2012) analysis of the murder of Angie Zapata, a working-class transwoman of color, who identified as “all woman” but had not completed her bureaucratic name change, is a tragic example of cultural unintelligibility (p. 412). In the trial that ensued after Zapata was violently killed, the defense deployed the “deception” trope to suggest that Angie was responsible for her own death. Cram notes that “in the eyes of the law, Angie did not exist” (p. 414, our italics). By enforcing the “normative notion of what the body of a human must be,” Angie and other sexual and gender minoritarian subjects, become unreal in the cultural imagination (Butler, 2004, p. 33). Through the process of derealization, Butler adds

[C]ertain lives are not considered lives at all, they cannot be humanized, that they fit no dominant frame for the human, and that this level then gives rise to a physical violence that in some sense delivers the message of dehumanization that is already at work in the culture. (2004, p. 34)

Unintelligible subjects are abject, unnatural, less than human, and not fully human (Butler, 1999). As such, they do not have social, legal, and political validity and legitimacy.

Queer relationality challenges the dehumanization and derealization of these subjects by making their lives, practices, and connections intelligible in the mainstream cultural imagination through the identification of normative violence and the development of alternative domains of cultural intelligibility. Normative violence, according to Butler (1999), refers to the power mechanisms through which certain bodies become devalued—dehumanized and derealized—by certain types of cultural norms and ideals (e.g., gender, race, sexuality). By identifying these norms and recognizing their violence in endorsing and determining what—and who—counts as culturally intelligible, a critical awareness can be developed to create the possibilities for cultural change.

To broaden domains of cultural intelligibility beyond heteronormative relations and social arrangements, different ways of relating, engaging, and connecting must be registered and examined by attending to the experiences and perspectives of minoritarian subjects. In short, it calls for exploring, embodying, and envisioning diverse queer relationalities.

Thinking, doing, and imagining queer relationalities

The authors in this special issue attempt to create alternative domains of cultural intelligibility by investigating queer relationality in multiple ways. The first group explores different ways of conceptualizing it, the second examines multiple ways of embodying it, and the third envisions new ways of imagining it. Together, they add notes, images, textures, scents, and flavors to the expansive world of queer relationalities.

Exploring: How queer relationalities have been conceptualized

A first group of scholars, represented here by Shuzhen Huang and Ryan Lescure, explore different ways of thinking about queer relationalities, conceptually and methodologically. Although they have different aims—one is a theoretical intervention and the second is a methodological invitation—to expand the terrain of queer relationalities, they both examine such relationalities by paying close attention to interpersonal connections, cultural contexts, personal and collective history, social locations, quotidian activities, and affective investments.

In the first article in this section, “Reclaiming Family, Reimagining Queer Relationality,” Shuzhen Huang argues for a queer relationality centered around biogenetic family often negated and neglected by Western queer scholars. Situated in Chinese society and using queer of color critique and postcolonial feminism, Huang affirms the importance of reclaiming family to examine queer relationality by centering ambivalence and inbetweeness and rejecting singular and unified positioning. By so doing, Huang invites us to rethink the meaning of queer and to expand queerness beyond the narrow Western, white, middle-class, and urban framework of mainstream queer theory.

In the second article in this section, “(Extra)ordinary Relationalities: Methodological Suggestions for Studying Queer Relationalities Through the Prism of Memory, Sensation, and Affect,” Ryan Lescure offers methodological recommendations for the examination of queer relationalities by contesting the normativity of data—acceptable and proper sources of information for research projects—in current scholarship. Focusing on ephemeral and covert instances of queer relationalities, Lescure centers the analysis of memory, sensation, and affect to make them legible in a dynamic interplay with power and cultural intelligibility.

These two articles expand our thinking about queer relationalities in several ways. First, Huang (re)introduces the biogenetic family as a potential site of queer relationality and challenges certainty and singular positioning in favor of ambivalence and inbetweeness. Second, Huang invites us to think about queerness beyond normative Western, white, and urban frameworks in the investigation of queer relationalities. Third, Lescure challenges us to look beyond normative data in the study of queer relationalities. Finally, Lescure suggests ways to understand the rich world of queer relationalities by highlighting ephemeral and covert moments of quotidian life and analyzing memory, sensation, and affect in such moments. Together, these articles provide interventions in the field of Communication, more generally, and Queer Studies, more specifically, by suggesting openness, impermanence, indeterminacy, plurality, and expansiveness in the ways we conceptualize and analyze relational phenomena, including queer relationalities.

Embodying: How queer relationalities have been inhabited

A second group of scholars, represented here by Godfried Asante, Shadee Abdi, Lore LeMaster and Satoshi Toyosaki, and Aaron Sachs, explore the inhabited dimensions of queer relationalities. These essays highlight the experience of queer relationality. While dramatically different in certain ways, these essays generally center around detailed descriptions of moments of queer relationality; how they are subjectively embodied, navigated, and understood; and how they relate to and challenge normativities, systems of power, and hegemonic frameworks of sensemaking. Engaging with these essays altogether demonstrates the diversity, complexity, and profoundness of queer relationalities. These articles demonstrate the contextuality and cultural specificity of queer relationalities, but they also describe certain commonalities that exist in relation to the cross-cultural navigation of queer relationalities. They demonstrate that queer relationalities take multiple forms, but also have a certain identifiable coherence—even as they are being described and engaged with in diverse ways.

In the first essay in this section, “Unexpected Intimacies: Exploring Sasso Relationality in Postcolonial Ghana,” Godfried Asante explores queer relationalities in a Ghanaian cultural context and advances the concept of Sasso relationality. Asante’s essay richly explores the nuanced relationships between the embodiment and navigation of queer relationalities and culture, power, language, history, colonialism, and globalization. After defining Sasso relationality, Asante presents two narratives that illustrate the concept and position it as being an example of queer relationality that resembles but does not rely on normative Western sensemaking frameworks of intelligibility. Indeed, Asante argues, Sasso relationality does not merely exist outside of these normative frameworks. It challenges them.

In the second essay, “Worldmaking with Aberoo: Queer Familial Relationality with/for Iranian Americans,” Shadee Abdi evokes the Iranian concept of aberoo to challenge normative colonial Western cultural logics—namely logics surrounding the family, the closet, and binary thinking. Abdi describes aberoo as a culturally specific form of face-saving that allows queer Iranian Americans to save face in relation to normative cultural values and familial structures while also maintaining their queer identities. Abdi presents 10 narratives from participants who identify as queer Iranians in the diaspora or queer Iranian Americans, ultimately arguing that aberoo constitutes a culturally specific form of queer relationality that challenges a variety of Western norms, which include but are not limited to norms surrounding sexuality.

In Lore LeMaster and Satoshi Toyosaki’s essay, “Ally as an Emerging Critical Orientation: Performing Praxis-Oriented Ally Subjectivity,” the authors explore and challenge power dynamics in relation to the concepts of ally and allyship. LeMaster and Toyosaki describe the problematic definition and manifestation of allyship in and beyond the neoliberal academy in relation to whiteness, heteronormativity, and cisnormativity. They explore and challenge this through a description of their relationship to themselves, each other, and the academy. Ultimately, LeMaster and Toyosaki intervene in the concept of allyship. They center race, gender, power, and subjectivity in their essay, eventually advancing a vision of allyship that is more firmly rooted in queer relationality and praxis rather than in identity.

Finally, in the essay, “Family Pictures: The Queer Relationalities of Multigenerational Queer Family,” Aaron Sachs advances the concept of (queer)spawn relationality. Through a detailed exploration of the queer structure and dynamics of his family, including the fact that he was born to lesbian parents using sperm from a sperm donor and that his daughter was also born to lesbian parents using his sperm, Sachs defines the figure of the (queer)spawn and argues that the (queer)spawn itself reinforces and challenges norms in relation to family, history, and biology. Additionally, Sachs notes that the (queer)spawn encapsulates, exemplifies, and adds to the conceptual tapestry of queer relationality.

These essays have many commonalities. For example, they all highlight the fact that queer relationalities are multiple, profound, elusive, ephemeral, and are often unintelligible from hegemonic cultural vantage points. In addition to making specific moments of queer relationality intelligible, these essays make these moments come alive. They provide a nuanced vision of power and how queer relationalities exist in relation to it. These authors present queer relationalities through a postmodern lens, illustrating that queer relationalities are subjective and that their navigation and interpretation depends substantially upon culture, context, power, and standpoint. Additionally, these authors present a dialectical vision of queer relationalities, often arguing overtly that queer relationalities have the capacity to simultaneously reflect, reproduce, and challenge normativities. While that is true, these essays all demonstrate the transformative potential of queer relationalities and their productive role in queer worldmaking.

While these essays share many commonalities, they also have some crucial divergences. The divergences, however, profoundly illustrate the breadth of what queer relationalities can be, what they can do, how they relate to power, and how people interpret their significance. Each of these essays focus on queer relationalities at the micro, meso, and macro levels, but some of the essays in this section approach queer relationalities more explicitly in relation to transnational phenomena such as globalization, colonialism, and the transnational movement of people and ideologies. Other articles focus more centrally on exploring queer relationalities in the context of culturally specific constructions such as family, academia, friendship, history, and time. While these essays might not adopt the same primary level of focus, each essay offers an intersectional and comprehensive exploration of how queer relationalities at the inhabited micro level relate to larger institutional, cultural, or global levels. Finally, each essay clearly describes the counterhegemonic potential of queer relationalities and their capacity to challenge and destabilize normativities.

Envisioning: How queer relationalities have been imagined

A third group of scholars, represented here by Aimee Carrillo Rowe, Shinsuke Eguchi and Bernadette Calafell, Emily Krebs, and Fatima Zahrae Chrifi Alaoui, offer close interpretations of the interdisciplinary practices and imaginaries offered by queer relationalities, locating creations of possibilities and indeterminacies at the center of their readings. As an interdisciplinary lens, queer relationality, they note, invokes formations of intelligibility and unintelligibility that operate together dialectically and challenge the perceived stability of a range of categories, including identity and locality. In so doing, they foreground the structurally ambiguous location of queer relationality as potential conceptions forged in the ruptures of hegemonic systems. Notably, by reading queer relationality through family, popular culture, disability, health, and virtual reality, the authors take on the challenges and possibilities that exist within the scope of queer relationality. The boundlessness of contexts offered in these essays contribute to the diversification of the (re)imagination of queer relationality across a myriad of subfields.

In the essay, “Akin to Kin: Queer Relationalities in Contemporary Family Memoir,” Aimee Carrillo Rowe examines alternative family memoirs to disrupt heteronormative familial structures to create what she terms, queer family relationalities. Through queer family relationalities, Carrillo Rowe uncovers the multiplicity of ways queer families feel and imagine their realities in relation to heteronormative scripts. By deviating from normative familial assumptions that pre-determine familial accessibility, Carrillo Rowe imagines the connective potentiality of queer relationality that makes room for queer family stories to exist.

Shinsuke Eguchi and Bernadette Calafell explore queer relationality through media analysis. In their essay, “Queer Relationalities, Impossible: The Politics of homonationalism and failure in LOGO’s Fire Island,” the authors offer a reading of queer relationality through the lens of homonationalism and failure. By analyzing LOGO’s hit reality show, Eguchi and Calafell unpack the concept of failure through its impossible possibilities, and how the show re-centers white heteronormative gay social scripts that fail queers of color. The show’s reliance on reifying the politics of respectability is juxtaposed by the resistive existence of queer castmates of color for whom queer relationality’s failure makes space for transgression.

In the essay, “Queering the Desire to Die: Access Intimacy as Worldmaking for Survival,” Emily Krebs analyzes queer relationality through the lens of health, disability justice, and suicidality. Highlighting the vast rate of suicide within lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities, Krebs marks the desire to die as a queer relation born as a response to historic violence and degradation of LGBTQ lives. Krebs underscores that it is in fact systems that are designed to disenfranchise and psychologically ostracize suicidal subjects. Calling for the demedicalization of suicide, Krebs implores for the acknowledgment of the interplay between living a life in a world that makes it seem impossible to keep living. It is the creation of queer spaces, which lovingly embrace and recognize that both experiences can coexist so that a community can emerge. Krebs argues that the demedicalization and the repoliticization of the desire to die, lies the possibility of queer worldmaking and queer relationality in a world not equipped to deal with the circumstances of its own creation.

Fatima Zahrae Chrifi Alaoui’s essay, “’You Know It’s Different in the Game Man’: Technodesiring, Technorelating, and TechnoBlackness as Analytical Modes of Queer Worldmaking in Black Mirror’s ‘Striking Vipers,’” explores the manifestation and potentiality of queer relationality in technocultures. Through an analysis of Black Mirror’s Striking Vipers episode, Alaoui argues that virtual reality can serve as a realm where desire and relationality can be explored and ultimately redefined beyond heteronormativity. She suggests the possibility of queer relationality to be used as a significant tool for analyzing how technology and technocultures to locate sites for queer worldmaking—existing between the material and virtual world. Alaoui expands queer relationality’s reach beyond material limitations and into the virtual by introducing the concepts of technodesiring, technorelating, and technoBlackness. Technodesiring is conceptualized as an instrument of analysis that places sexual desire at the center, in turn defying real-life limitations within techno spheres. In the same vein, technorelating is offered as a tool of analysis that emphasizes the sociality and affectivity of relationality within techno spaces. Lastly, technoBlackness provides an analytical tool for re-centering and unpacking the intersection of both technology and race. Together these conceptualizations extend queer relationality’s scope to reimagine relating and desiring beyond the material world.

What these pieces bring to the fore is the presence and potential for queer relationality, both present and future, to be found. Each author makes a call toward envisioning queer worldmaking to explore how power crosscuts our readings and conceptualizations of sexuality, relationality, and the norm, while remaining particularly attuned to how both heteronormative and non-heteronormative practices, desires, and categories of relationalities are rendered visible in unintelligible contemporary contexts. Queer relationality as understood in these works varied from place to place and person to person, but ultimately aimed to make sense of queer relationality where its presence becomes necessary for survival. This includes whether that survival surround the maintenance of family, highlighted through its failures, found within health discourses, or located outside of the realm of the material.

Queer relationality does not aim to simply locate queer subjects or relationalities where there were presumed to be none, but rather to reimagine alternative modes of intimacy and care, as in Krebs’ contribution where subjects are able to co-create their narratives, ultimately impacting structural normativities and institutions, much like Carrillo Rowe’s furthering conceptualizations of family. Family becomes an assemblage of queer relationalities, wherein family relationalities are presented as a chaotic map or wide array of attractions and influences. This chaos makes relationalities unintelligible as the case in Eguchi and Calafell’s essay where heteronormative relationalities offer an opportunity for a transracial friendship that celebrates otherness and unfamiliar mediatic intimacies. The dialectics between dubiety and familiar relationalities are central in Alaoui’s exploration of queer technorelationalities, wherein sexuality, queerness, and race are affectively situated within technoculture to creatively explore and engage with queer worldmaking—a world that is outside of the boundaries of normative expectations. These queer relationalities of both normative and non-normative subjects enable the imagination of a queer possibility and futurity not bounded by the limit of traditional understandings and practices of sociality.

While each paper diverged in relation to content and context, the authors approach research on queer relationality from myriad perspectives. What each paper highlights are the necessity to read queer relational texts that might not otherwise be evident—whether those connections are made on television, within memoirs and people’s stories, within families, or within a virtual reality that transcends real world expectations. What is clear from all these works is that queer relationalities are often born out of necessity, not always visible, not always successful, but ultimately remain spaces for transformation. Finally, the interdisciplinary potential for queer relationality is boundless and it is clear that there are many more scholarly areas that would benefit from these readings.

Implications

By investigating queer relationality, this special issue advances new modes of relating, engaging, and connecting to illustrate a framework of queer possibilities that is diverse and not final. Indeed, we intend for this special issue to serve as a compelling foundation for queer relationalities that will inspire subsequent exploration and conversation. In this special issue, queer relationality is exemplified in a myriad of ways, including discourse, contiguity, and linearity, which are foundational concepts often overlooked within communication studies and queer studies when defining relationality as inherently teleological. Often, the adverse of this notion is true, in that queerness can primarily be found within the transgressive ruptures experienced in daily life. In this vein, this special issue, finds queer relationality within the mundane, messy, and often unintelligible chasms of lived experience—across time and space. Queer relationality offers a framework that makes room for scholars to find and read queerness across different contexts, including histories, localities, affinities, and affects. In this section, we explore the theoretical, methodological, and political implications of queer relationality.

Theoretical implications

Queer relationality, as demonstrated in this special issue, is theorized and conceptualized beyond a reductionist framework of social experiences. Queer relationality does not involve singular theoretical viewpoints or specific propositions about genders and sexualities. Rather, it offers multiple ways of recognizing and studying sociality and relationality. Queer relationality ergo has three theoretical implications that help to address the epistemic violence in Western academe holistically.

First, queer relationality can theoretically push back against longstanding assumptions about queer bodies that rely mainly on Western theories, contexts, and geographies. By employing queer relationality as a theoretical tool, scholars are better able to engage in active decolonizing through scholarship by challenging much of the hegemonic worldviews, and theories, and ways of knowing born out of Euro-American philosophy. Queer relationality, as a theoretical aperture, requires scholars to unlearn sociality, relationality, queerness, as understood solely in the West, to instead make room for new increased connections that do not fall into the limited Western definition of queerness.

The second theoretical implication of queer relationality is understood through underscoring locality, subjectivity, and positionality when telling queer stories and trying to better understand queerness as an inclusive commitment. Third, queer relationality can theoretically allow for a revisiting of epistemological practices through intentional geopolitical and transnational lens that underscores the connectivity within, throughout, and around multiple geographies, genders, and sexualities. Thus, by offering inclusive and complete readings and more successful theoretical engagements, queer relationality can advance the epistemological significance of queerness that exists within the margins, in turn rejecting dualism and pushing back against longstanding hierarchies of power within oppressive structures.

Methodological Implications

In addition to theoretical implications, this special issue approaches queer relationality as a significant advancement to critical research that centers intersectional queer subjectivities. Queer relationality offers three methodological implications that bridge emerging and esteemed research and researchers in academe invested in finding innovative new ways for doing methods.

First, queer relationality methodologically centers the chaotic, unintelligible, ordinary sociality in conversation within a multiplicity of cultural contexts, geographies, memories, sensations, and affective investments. Second, queer relationality demands an operational rigor, meticulousness, and critical direction. As a method, queer relationality necessitates close consideration of the social context of the research/researcher as well as the political motivations and positionality of the scholars doing the work. Third, queer relationality makes space for inclusive knowledge production that can supports theoretical, empirical, and ethical rigor by relying on reflexivity in practice. Queer relationality offers many opportunities for further critical interventions that value accessibility, ethical and political projects, and most importantly, self-reflexivity about who they are and their investment in this work.

Political implications

Finally, queer relationality offers three clear political implications for critical researchers pursuing this line of inquiry. First, it is through queer relationality that researchers can resist longstanding institutional injustices that has insofar served to safeguard hegemonic Western ways of knowing, sensing, experiencing, embodying, and doing queerness. Queer relationality as a political ethic emphasizes intentional undoing and unlearning. Second, queer relationality as a political orientation supports the advancing of the narratives of minoritarian subjects to create and build alternative spaces, networks, and ways of knowing that transcend the heteropatriarchal and colonial barricade within research. By employing queer relationality as a political framework, scholars can be more actively engaged in the process of (re)shaping a more just social and political order in academe and beyond.

Third, queer relationality’s major political implication is its purposeful push back against longstanding structures and frameworks that make particular forms of knowledge of special value. In other words, queer relationality aims to critically dismantle the hierarchies, boundaries, and borders that impede, impact, and influence the ability to highlight diverse ways of knowing the world. Queer relationality moves us toward the pursuit of inclusive knowledge production by amplifying those that resist colonial and imperialist frameworks that have insofar been understood as canonical, or what Edward Said defines as, political knowledge. Political knowledge is the hierarchical and colonial mechanism of power used to dominate subordinate groups—a form of power that establishes a system of “truth” that nurtures hierarchies and injustices (Foucault, 1990). Accordingly, the resilience and durability of oppressive structures within Western academe is explicated by the power of cultural hegemony in sustaining what is considered higher knowledge (Said, 1979.

In all, the essays in this special issue offer myriad ways to understand and utilize queer relationality as a theoretical, methodological, and political lens for the study of queerness all together. Queer relationality reflects long-standing contestations over power, agency, and influence in the study of minoritarian issues, politics, and people, which lays the groundwork for a lifetime of future research that pushes back against the enduring stronghold of the ivory tower.

Future research

Because queer relationality recognizes how structures, epistemologies, and actions are dependent on sociality and relationalities, scholars maintain and duplicate systems of power and exclusion. By centering queer relationality, scholars should prioritize human agency and social interdependence as a principal value in doing inclusive research. Queer relationality compels future researchers to engage in the active creation of equity, mutuality, and reciprocity that works to oppose and reverse deep-rooted systems of privilege, power, and epistemic injustice. Future researchers should also attend to minoritarian subjects’ debates, indigenous knowledge processes, and public discourses for the purposes of expanding knowledge, building dialogue, and creating equitable spaces for communities to tackle racialized, sexual, gendered, epistemic, methodological, or embodied hierarchies on their own terms. Future researchers should also continue to recognize that queer relationality is always already evolving as there is no one way to statically explicate one’s proximity to queerness and cultural unintelligibility. Thus, the potential for furthering and strengthening critical and intersectional studies on queer relationality is endless.

To conclude, the essays assembled in this special issue represent, in our view, just the infancy of queer relationality. Our hope is that moving forward, critical researchers in the humanities and social sciences (and beyond) can incorporate more subjective communication practices and relational experiences that exist, and that have always existed, in the margins of cultural unintelligibility. These are the stories that potentiate the radical enhancement of the study of an expanding horizon of queerness that relies on a social world just beginning to be imagined and explored.

Acknowledgement

Gust thanks Pierre Lucas, my furry bodhisattva, for his teaching about unconditional love and different subjectivities and relationalities, and Dr. John Elia, for his friendship and ongoing support of this project. Fatima Zahrae Chrifi Alaoui thanks Gust Yep and Ryan Lescure for their continued support and tremendous labor of love and care throughout this process. Ryan thanks Amelia and Luna for their love, friendship, and support, as well as Gust Yep, Fatima Zahrae Chrifi Alaoui, Victoria Chen, Wenshu Lee and other activist scholars whose scholarship demonstrates that the most impactful deconstructionist scholarship should not just aim to critique, but should also aim to construct and provide a clear vision for radical social change.

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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