Queer life-worlds and the art of David Wojnarowicz

ABSTRACT

The article proposes an analysis of bio- and necropolitics through the notion of intensity in the framework of a Deleuze-and-Guattari-inflected queer theory. One aspect of biopower thus revealed is the power to both animate and deaden, to regulate movement and stoppage, to sensitivise and desensitivise. The article further argues for an alternative, more-than-human or cosmopolitical ecology of affects and affiliations. What is crucial for bioresistance is the capacity to learn to be affected in ever new ways, and art is singled out as the laboratory of such learning. The more ways an entity learns to be affected, the more connectivity it is capable of, and the more potential ‘lines of flight’ or social and cosmic refigurations become possible. The theoretical propositions are juxtaposed with selected works by David Wojnarowicz, not so much for the sake of interpretation as with a view to revitalizing and, perhaps, redirecting contemporary queer thinking and activism. I particularly emphasize the ways in which Wojnarowicz’s work can mobilize a deprivatisation and deatomisation of affects and desire. In order to effectively resist current bio- and necropolitics, I propose, queer must seek to expand the ways of being alive and being-alive-to, ways to affect and be affected.

KEYWORDS:

• David Wojnarowicz
• queer art
• queer activism
• biopolitics
• intensities
• bioresistance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I am clearly indebted to Berlant and Warner’s (1998) discussion of queer world-making, but my usage in this article gestures towards Guattari-Deleuzian and New Materialist ontologies that emphasize the material entanglements between the human and the nonhuman.

2. Rudolph Giuliani’s crackdown on New York’s sex industry is a case in point.

3. Plugged into the apparatuses of pharmaco-technological biocapitalism, Preciado experiments with illegally obtained pharmacological substances (testosterone) to explore body-altering sensations and alternative subjectivities.

4. It is not beside the point to point out note that in the Haitian traditions from which the modern world appropriated the figure of the zombie, the zombie was precisely not let die.

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Notes on contributors

Tomasz Sikora

Tomasz Sikora has published and lectured widely on queer theory, biopolitics, literature, visual arts, and more. He is the author of two books: Virtually Wild: Wilderness, Technology and the Ecology of Mediation (2003) and Bodies Out of Rule: Transversal Readings in Canadian Literature and Film (2014). He co-founded and continues to co-edit the online peer-reviewed journal of queer studies InterAlia (published in English and Polish at www.interalia.queerstudies.pl).