On purpose: solidarity by accident or design and the generative ambiguity in between

ABSTRACT

This text is about queer (deviant and defiant) modes and methodologies of community and communal projects. I mobilize the multiplicity (and multiple potentialities) of how different members envision and invest in concepts of solidarity, community and belonging. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork within a support group that mobilized for the rights and wellbeing of queer exiles in Helsinki/Finland, I narrate and analyze how members’ proximity in an atmosphere of skepticism and ambiguity animates imaginations and analyses. A breakdown in communication challenges our sense of sovereignty over meaning or purpose but mobilizes nonsovereignty as a politically responsive and responsible engagement with uncertainty.

KEYWORDS:

• community
• exile
• generative ambiguity
• queer (politics and methodology)

Introduction: on the purpose and politics of queer communities

This text is about queer community politics and how they take shape in the spatial proximity of community members. The protagonists of this ethnography are queer exiles, and the scene is a support group (in an NGO I will anonymize here as the Organization). That Organization mobilized for LGBTQ+ asylum seekers’ rights and wellbeing. I use the term ‘queer’ in this text to refer to what does not comply with norms of sexuality (that is interchangeable with LGBTQI+). However, while sexuality and gender are crucial sites of queer mobilization, the term queer is never coterminous with notions of gender and sexuality. Queer, is never fully defined or stable, always redeployed, and expanding in purpose and direction (Butler, 1993). For Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick queer is ‘excessive, or oblique in relation to the codes most readily available’ (1993, p. 3). I focus on acts and comments that seem to be excessive to and divergent from community ideals or norms of legibility. I trace what participants’ ambiguous and disruptive acts and comments reveal about community dynamics and politics of queer exiles.

The term exile is not a romantic or melodramatic term for ‘asylum seeker’ or ‘displaced’. Instead, it is charged with the sense of alienation that haunts the person, not only in judicial, legal and national policy terms, but in modes of belonging and communication in places and communities of refuge. Queer in itself implies exile. Queer inhabits a realm of alienation vis-à-vis modes and codes of belonging to the nation, community and family that are readily available (Ali, 2023b; Georgis, 2006). That alienation might be as harsh as not having secured a legal residence permit on the territory of the country of refuge (like the participants that figure in this study). Moreover, alienation figures in terms and norms of belonging and home making even within queer milieus and support groups in the country of refuge.

This research mainly happened within the support group, in the living-room-like community space that we created at the NGO, the Organization. There, we witnessed how queer politics was not (only) about flaunting identity and pride, but (also) tackling what it meant to belong, how to mobilize that belonging and how to tackle the divergence, dissonance and skepticism among members.¹ I am interested in what participants’ ambiguous and disruptive comments reveal about community’s incoherence. I mobilize Gillian Rose’s concept of lack (1997), to gesture that community convenes around tackling lacks. I see that a community in its political sense mobilizes around the lack of finding modes of communication and translation among members. People’s corporeal and experiential proximity at sites of a queer communities presses for tackling the lack in communication and translatability. Translatability here is not strictly linguistic but communal and communicative (Shindo, 2012). It is about how to make a collective sense of a community, belonging and the mobilization and purpose of that community.

Across EU countries and in Finland, LGBTQI+/Queer-asylum support groups convene around tackling different lacks in the life of the queer exile: legal, bureaucratic, recreational and welfare-related (Ali, 2023a, 2023b; Dustin & Held, 2021). The multiplicity of needs and the much-needed support found in such groups is so valued by members that these groups understandably become akin to families in exile, and they are even called as such (Dustin & Held, 2021, Ali 2023a, 2023b). Like in any family, community or group, members negotiate the meanings and means of community. In the support group I write from/about, the general purpose was to cater for the multiple lacks and alienations of queer asylum seekers in their navigation and negotiation (state-authorized) protection and residence permits. Previous studies, in various European countries and Finland, have discussed how tenuous and protracted that process is. During that process, the claimants have limited access to services and institutions like work and study and the social and material infrastructures these enable (Ali, 2023a, 2023b; Held, 2022; Wimark, 2021). In the Finnish context, Jukka Könönen (2018) shows how the conditions and complications of asylum procedures and bureaucracies cut across all aspects of life, and weighs heavy on the person’s access to state institutions, services and communities of belonging and even leisure activities. This means that the legal and judicial lack will figure in the lives of asylum seekers in multiple needs and lacks; lack of a legalized settlement, lack of social connections and lack of peace of mind. The support group in my ethnography, that members often called ‘family’, was a site of navigating multiple lacks and negotiating what it meant to belong to a support group that tackled multiple lacks, and to the rainbow family (queer community in Finland and Europe) that the family claimed belonging to.

Some members joined the group for the dire need of legal help, and for the desire for community and companionship in the social austerity they experienced meanwhile they lived in legal limbo (waiting for their asylum claims to be processed). Others, like me, joined as volunteers, academics and/or activists, who mobilized to tackle the alienation that participants experienced. Those needs and purposes of joining were not exclusive of each other. I joined the group both as a volunteer translator/interpreter (between Arabic, French and English), as a researcher. At the same time, I was a member who found mooring and community in the group, and I developed friendships and acquaintances among members.

My question is not about the very purpose of membership or belonging: or whose membership was utilitarian (whether in research or legal matters) and whose came out of a sense of affinity to the group. These purposes are never mutually exclusive. Authentic emotions and affinities themselves are tools and utilities to build and bolster narratives of self and belonging (Ahmed, 2014). Instead, my question is: how our political sense and sensibility takes shape in our proximity, and how community sites are venues where collective politics happens to the ambiguity of belonging and purpose that traverse any group, collective or community. In other words: How a community/collective holds a common ground (and political commons) where divergence, uncertainty and ambiguity invigorate potentialities and politics. If community and family entail home and belonging, then politics of family/community needs to cater for the dilemmatic scene of politics of belonging. For Reiko Shindo (2021) home and belonging do not have to imply a place of absolute ease and comfort, but a place that allows for mystery and confusion, where, belonging means space and freedom to work through contradictory emotions and modes of being in common. Belonging to a space or a group might (or should) entail the possibility of remaining different, untranslatable or even deviant in some aspects (Shindo, 2021). That is for Shindo (2012), community as a shared mode of being, ‘not a full circle, but an open-ended line’ (p. 149): unfinished and continuous where each single and singular act of sharing is an enactment of a possible and potential mode of community.

Tracing such enactments of belonging, requires a methodology that tunes into the multitudes of acts and their potential meanings and purposes (or the ambiguity of it). That entails research that dwells on the very researcher’s skepticism and struggle to make sense of acts and happenings in the field. In that sense, the researcher inhabits the field in non-sovereign relationality towards other actors in their corporeal, affectual and experiential proximity. Nonsovereignty, here does not mean surrendering or submission. Instead, as Derek Ruez and Daniel Cockayne put it, it means to remain ‘attuned to the importance of thinking affect and epistemology together’ and ‘engage with other stories[,] ideas and concepts’ (2021, p. 102). In my fieldwork, this meant to engage with the ambiguity of the meaning and the intentions of the participants, rather than trying to filter it out as a failure to discern and define or resolve.

The community project I write from (the support group) is a site of attempting to resolve, rather than resolved and settled differences. For Lauren Berlant (2016) the ‘better power of the commons is to point to a way to view what’s broken in sociality, the difficulty of convening a world conjointly’ (2016, p. 395). Dissonance, ambiguity and skepticism in community do not necessarily mean a breakdown in community. Instead, they gesture that community and belonging entail the space and freedom for communication across modes of belonging, mobilization, activism, solidarity and their interpretation. Before elaborating further on my theory and methodology, I will display a scene from my fieldwork in order to ground and contextualize my arguments and concepts.

Family trouble

The ethnography I write from happened within the weekly meetings of the support group hosted by the Organization. The meetings had a cozy atmosphere in a living-room-like space where around 10–20 participants gathered. We had themed and casual conversations over snacks and warm drinks. I visited these meetings every two weeks over a period of 3 years. I also volunteered as a translator/interpreter when needed.

November 2020: our meetings had become fewer and more dispersed than before, due to the Corona pandemic. The spirit was low. Before the meeting, the group coordinator Hani cautioned me: ‘it is going to be a tough day’ – The common space at the Organization meant much to the wellbeing of the members in their exile. Many understandably referred to our group (meetings) as ‘family’. Them having not been around for a while meant they had less commons (common spaces) to fall back on, especially that most communal venues had to shut down. That was especially the case of those who were in the asylum application process.

In the introduction round, on that day, as usual and ritual, we introduced ourselves and how we had been feeling recently. Fadi, one of the members, spoke in Arabic and I translated into English. He said to me in an impulsive, protesting but confidential tone ‘every week had been worse than the previous one’, but he asked me not to translate that. ‘Just say I am fine. Nothing new in my life’. Fadi had been in legal limbo for 5 years, ‘nothing new’ meant he was still stuck there. His claim for asylum was rejected in 2015. Since then, he had been in a chronic and recurrent state of legal and bureaucratic complications: (re)appealing for protection and legal residence in Finland. Not only on that day, but often, he would look anxious and depressed. He would say (to me) that he did not want to speak about that in order ‘not to spoil his and others’ mood’, as he came to the meetings to ‘forget about his problems in the first place’.

Gabriella, another member of ‘our family’ was present on that day. She introduced herself after Fadi. Then she spoke about how ‘blessed’ she had been feeling recently, because she belonged to ‘our family’. She now had ‘many brothers and sisters’. Gabriella sounded poetic but that poetic-ness sounded provocative and ambiguous. My point is not to verify whether she intended to sound so. The point is the awkward juxtaposition between Gabriella’s comments (and way of acting) and Fadi’s. After Fadi’s reluctance to share his trouble among ‘family’ members (and after speaking about that in matters of mood to me), it was unavoidable to sense the parody evoked, even if not certainly intended, by Gabriella, and her grateful and celebratory mood. Her remarks, even if they were genuinely celebrating our ‘family’, highlighted the irony of the situation to Fadi and myself. Fadi said to me that he ‘did not understand what she meant’. In that, Fadi seemed to confirm that Gabriella’s meaning was not that simple to pinpoint. Not because her language was unclear, but because the simplicity of how she celebrated our family sounded awkward in juxtaposition to Fadi’s mood and mode of presence in that family.

Gabriella’s act (or remarks) were akin to a sharp commentary on the purpose of the Organization, and the purpose and consequentiality of its chronic façade of joy and gratitude. By keeping the scene (or the façade of) joy least disturbed, she involved us in a real-time embodied, spatial and affective experience of that scene. She protested the daily and hourly crisis that some members (like Fadi) lived under the appearance of familiality and ordinary familiarity.

For Berlant, Slow death, has become a mode of living (or rather dying) for ‘populations marked out for wearing out’. (2011, p. 278) By accident or design, Gabriella’s comments drew attention to the slow death that was happening in our community and family. Fadi and others (and perhaps Gabriella herself) experienced that slow death and attrition of life under the ordinary guise of familial gratitude and bliss. Spatial and experiential proximity among members highlighted and accentuated the unjust and fraught terms of that family mundane. That proximity also gestured towards new, collateral and alternative modes and methodologies of communication and meaning making.

The proximity of different actors and their different embodiment of the circumstance might in itself, without intention or beside intention trigger different thinking about commonality. An act can be disruptive and generative beyond intention and notions of intentionality. As Engin Isin puts it, the act’s ‘answerability’ is irreducible to ‘intentionality’ or ‘calculation’ (2008, p. 34).

In the following section, I will contextualize my fieldwork in the wider sociopolitical circumstance of the support group I write from/about. I will also go through previous (queer and less queerly themed) research that foregrounded the spontaneous, accidental and inevitable negotiation and enactment of belonging that happens in the everyday and the mundane. Then I discuss, with other scholars, sociopolitical considerations that happen among members in their urban and corporeal proximity in situations of dissonance, disagreement and lack of shared understanding. Next, in the Methods and Positionality section, I elaborate further on positionality among participants and how I mobilized the method of non-sovereign cinematic approach to dwell on the ambiguity of positions and intentions in the field. Finally, I reference and analyse one more ethnographic scene, to show how my method mobilizes uncertainty and ambiguity to trace alternative politics and academic analyses of politics.

Context and literature review: proximity triggers subversive narratives

The urgency for legal and bureaucratic settlement and the complication of the legal and bureaucratic procedures are characteristics of queer exile in Europe and Finland (Ali, 2023a, 2023b; Dustin & Held, 2021; Peltonen & Jungar, 2018). In this urgency, the politics of gender and sexuality is often channelled and reduced into the complacent assimilation into a globalized and normalized LGBTQ+ identity (Akin & Svendsen, 2017; Koçak, 2020; Massad, 2007; Peltonen & Jungar, 2018). The paradox (and irony) is when the purpose of queer politics, politics that are supposed to problematize norms and identities, become coterminous with proving a sexual identity and qualifying for asylum according to that. In protest, I address how the queer exile tackles the tension between the urgency for state protection and bureaucratic settlement and the urge and need for queerer norms of belonging and mobilization. To trace that, I deploy a pluralistic methodology that tunes into the subtleties and potentialities of acts and statements of actors/participants. I show how tracing politics and change in the mundane of queer communities demands dwelling with ambiguities and skepticism to appreciate the political generativity in these. Michal Taussig endorses a more cinematic and less sociological mode of reckoning that undoes sociological claims of mastery of meaning and claims of detachment from the field (Taussig, 2020). I mobilize non-mastery as a political responsiveness and attunement to the field. A cinematic approach does not mean fictional, but embodied and experiential in real-time and effect.

In queer politics and community projects, the embodiment and proximity among those who identity as queer is formative and transformative in shaping narratives and mobilization. Queers who do not, or cannot, conform to white/Western middle class narratives and norms of appearance (like those racialized as Muslim) often experience LGBT/queer spaces as unwelcoming, unsafe or injurious. Their bodies are deemed out of place or category within these spaces. (Bacchetta et al., 2015; Boussalem, 2021; DasGupta & Dasgupta, 2018; El-Tayeb, 2012; Puar, 2017) That experience of injurious spaces triggers coalitional politics, and shared agendas, premised on shared experience and affect (Bacchetta et al., 2015; Keskinen, 2022). The focus in previous queer-themed research has often been on how community and collective politics takes shape (and reshape) within the incoherence and ambivalence of identification, belonging and affinity among members (Boussalem, 2021; DasGupta & Dasgupta, 2018; Joseph, 2002; Keskinen, 2022; Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018). I shift that focus to zoom into the particularities, subtleties and ambiguities of that incoherence and ambivalence. What if we cannot pinpoint the participants’ meaning and purpose? What if we tune into that very uncertainty and witness what spontaneous and ambiguous political work it triggers beside the singular and collective agendas? Few if any ethnographic studies tackled these questions, but several (including ones mentioned above) do point in that direction.

For example, Alessandro Boussalem’s ethnography in Brussels, shows racialized queers navigating belonging and safety in more-or-less spontaneous proximity to different actors in different neighbourhoods. The constant negotiation of spaces and modes of belonging challenges mainstream narratives that conflate safety with Europeanness/Whiteness, and danger with racialized (as Muslim) areas. Queer people’s accidental and mundane encounters in neighbourhoods framed as homophobic can induce sociopolitical shifts. Standing out in gender-non-conforming appearances and manners and engaging in accidental conversations with inhabitants of these neighbourhoods about the meaning of religion and norms of the community is doing politics. These mundane politics happen as a side/inevitable effect of living in common, sometimes on the street and sometimes in class (Boussalem, 2021). Still, such politics enact and instantiate modes of queer belonging to the racialized spaces. This also animates static narratives of such spaces as antithetic to queer existence and politics (Boussalem, 2021). Debanuj DasGupta and Rohit K. Dasgupta’s ethnography in the UK (2018) shows how the racialized-as-Muslim queer found himself unexpectedly and explicitly excluded (even mocked) at gay bars in West End London, due to his looks/ethnicity. Surprisingly, he found partial but safer belonging among (sexually more normative) Muslim home mates whom he previously assumed as uncompromisingly hostile to homosexuals. Boussalem and DasGupta and Dasgupta point towards an unfinished and spontaneous navigation of belonging that happens in the mundane and unplanned embodiment and proximity.

Other studies (beyond the so-identifying queer or gender-political spaces and communities) discussed initiatives that actively mobilized the politics in mundane proximity in peace- and community- building in (post) armed conflict zones. In an ethnography on initiatives of community- and peace-building in Columbia, Allison Hayes-Conroy and Alexis Saenz Montoya (2017) emphasize the visceral and spatial aspects in shaping political affections and undoing social hostilities. That work of corporeality and proximity is ‘not possible to fully regulate’ and it ‘entails some uncertainty, imperfection, and loss of control’ (Hayes-Conroy and Saenz Montoya 2017, p.153). However, in letting go of control and set agendas, (in experimental proximity between actors) some participants found ‘intense feelings of worth and dignity’. Others ‘describe[d] sudden epiphanic dispositions towards their neighbors, seeing beauty and sanctity where they once saw rivalry and danger’ (Hayes-Conroy and Saenz Montoya 2017, p. 153).

However, proximity does not always entail such intimate corporeality, neither does it entail epiphanic or revolutionary politics of community. As Derek Ruez (2017) puts it, ‘co-presence of plural projects and actors together in the city necessitate politics’ but does not necessarily entail a ‘communitarian imagining of commonality’ (p. 897). Lapiņa’s ethnography (2022) on multicultural areas in Copenhagen shows how residential and urban proximity among differently identifying actors might accentuate separation and political disengagement. Inhabiting a site of multicultural proximity might be an identitarian project of diversity tourism, as Lapiņa puts it. Lapiņa shows how sometimes, the white citizen’s proximity to the poverty and trouble of the racialized and non-citizen neighbour is akin to ‘consuming the diverse, local urban spaces’ (p. 592) where the forms of suffering in the troubled neighbour’s life are ‘perceived as non-events’ (p. 589), and the white-citizen keeps ‘trapped by its own gaze’ (p. 578) and project of self-development.

In such cases, notions of convivial cohabitation might rest on ambiguities, proximity might be confused with commonality. This is not the kind of ambiguity I am interested in. Such ambiguity might work to sustain an unreflective, or reflective but short of engaged, political thinking.

Eeva Puumala and Karim Maïche (2021) tackle different forms of less convivial, but more acknowledged, ambiguity and untranslatability in multicultural urban proximity. Authors show how the sense of community (understood as belonging to an area or neighbourhood) rests on tensions and sometimes aggression between multivocal subjectivities. That sense of community or belonging takes shape to members’ dissonant and resonant narratives and feelings about inhabiting the same area. My discussion, however, concerns more intentional community projects than just shared neighbourhoods. I focus on collectives like the Organization, that involve a notion of shared project or collaboration, even if (or rather especially because) the meaning, direction and prognosis of that collaboration is subject to ambiguity and ongoing meaning making.

Giulia Carabelli’s ethnography on grassroots activism in Bosnia and Herzegovina tackles the contradictions and cracks in community- and peace-building projects. Carabelli asks ‘what happens when [participants’] desires come together to compete, diverge, or claim priority’ (Carabelli, 2019, p. 190)? Carabelli goes beyond notions of disagreement and divergence. She ‘embrace[s] Berlant’s proposition to engage with non-sovereign modalities of agency, which challenges the notion of agency as a singular, calculating and purposeful’ (Carabelli, 2019, p.185). Participants in Carabelli’s ethnography adopted, or unintendedly adapted to, nonsovereign modalities by letting go of set agendas. The site of a non-profit bike repair shop worked as a ‘community-catalyst’ (p. 187) in which people irrespective of their party affiliations and identifications convened and communicated in immediate proximity to tackle (the aftermath of) ethnic conflict. For Carabelli, the term activism does not necessarily mean a uniform identity or agenda. Instead, ‘it signals the desire to move, to be active, and to activate resources that could produce meaningful change’ (p. 186) where politics emerge irrespective of agendas. This is a political move and change in the very term of ‘activism’, a reproduction of what it means to be active in a community, where community and politics and agendas are unfinished projects, constantly negotiated.

In the ethnographies mentioned above, subjects and ethnographers seem to assume sovereignty, if not over agendas, at least over their narratives of happenings and acts in the field. I am more interested in the uncertainty and ambiguity of the intentions and the meaning making in the scene of community. While I intend to apply the cinematic approach (inhabiting the scene in nonsovereignty over narratives) in ethnography, what I witnessed closest to that approach was in a non-ethnographic study by Reiko Shindo (2018).² The protagonist of that study is an anonymous whistleblower who exposes classified information about nuclear energy governance in Japan in fictional novels. The novels blur the boundaries between fiction and fact, as well as between subject positions. The whistleblower ‘mixes fictional characters, who are based on actual characters, with non-fictional events [and] actual news clips’ (p. 192). The anonymous whistleblower’s ‘voice is there, but it lacks singularity that can be manifested as a nameable subject. […] unmaking the distinction between potentiality and actuality’ (p. 195). The whistleblower hiding behind the pseudonym is untraceable into a single factual subject: who and how many and what their actual intentions and factual experiences of the field of governance they write about are. The action of the whistleblower(s) ‘points to the need to think about resistance when there is no clearly identifiable subject’ (p. 194). What matters is not the identifiability of the actor, but how the act triggers people (other actors in the scene of politics and governance) to think through issues that had been invisible or unthinkable for them.

What I take from Shindo’s discussion, and what is of relevance to my study, is how activism and politics happen in a scene where subject positions are blurred. In other words, we cannot claim surety or mastery over where the subject comes from; what their exact intentions are. One subject’s reality might figure as fictional to another subject. However, even what seems like fiction (lacking factuality), or ambiguous (lacking clarity), can trigger communal questioning. I trace how the juxtaposition of different realities triggers communal potentialities and shapes the scene of a community (a queer family). My question is, how the proximity of different subjects and subjective realities could be socio-politically generative and potentializing instances and forms of solidarity.

Theory: community is an unfinished project of communicability

Gillian Rose conceptualizes community as an unfinished project ‘at once pressingly there yet strangely absent’, never settled, a space of ‘a shared lack’ (1997, p. 9). I see that lack branches into different senses, including the lack of understandability. Hardt and Negri’s concept of common (resting on communication between singularities), and Berlant’s notion of nonsovereignty as being receptive and communicative in real time, speak to Rose’s notion of community as lack. A community of lack might gather around the tenuous work of communication, around recognizing lack and limits of understandability. That is community as a site of attempting to resolve, rather than resolved and settled differences, a site of ambiguity and untranslatability.

I take the support group at the Organization, and the community and the space it convened as a corporeal and conceptual venue where people tackle lacks. I take it as a site and an infrastructure for planned and accidental negotiation of the structure of ‘a family’ or a community and the meaning (making) of that structure. ‘Structure’ for Berlant is a malleable ‘convergence of force and value [t]hat organizes transformation’. It is ‘only solid when seen from a distance’ (Rose, 1997, p. 394). While ‘infrastructure’ is ‘the living mediation’ of that organization/structure (p. 393). Looking into infrastructure betrays malleability that is otherwise curtailed by solid and structured notions of community and agendas. In that sense, collectivity is less encumbered by notions of belonging, and more attuned to the lens of ‘proxemics’: ‘the study of sociality as proximity quite distinct from the possessive attachment languages of belonging’ (Rose, 1997, p. 395). A family’s or a community’s ‘promissory logics of happiness’ might set ‘paths of happiness’ that curb considerations of ‘the hap’ (Ahmed, 2010, p. 581). The promise of community, and belonging, might coalesce into a hegemonic and homogeneous structure of concepts, values and claims over sociopolitical purpose and methods of mobilization. But queer is ongoing deviance from and defiance to definitions, terms and terminology of ‘community’ and ‘common’ and communal/collective politics. Queer is never fully defined or stable, always redeployed and expansive (Butler, 1993) deviant and defiant to normalcies and traditions (Cohen, 2004).

Queer has historically and globally pioneered in challenging boundaries of belonging. For Dina Georgis, queer has always been predisposed to the diaspora and exile (if diaspora means a problematic belonging, a place of exile vis-à-vis home and homeland and kinship) (Georgis, 2006). I take the matter further and I see queerness as not only a realm of exile vis-à-vis home and belonging, but also vis-à-vis norms and modes of mobilization. In that sense, the lack in queer communities of exile is multiple, not only material and administrative (achieving a legal status in a welfare state), not only social (tackling the alienation experienced in a place of exile), but also conceptual and communicational (finding the terms of communication and meaning making of queer politics). For Rose (1997), the lack that the community convenes to tackle is not an inherent quality of members but a mode of relation vis-à-vis marginalizing norms. Rose, agrees with Jean-Luc Nancy that community is about sharedness of a lack that is never defined by identity but constantly reconstructed in an ‘unstable flux’ (Rose, 1997, p. 10). Likewise, Shindo resonates Nancy in his notion of community as ‘unworking’ and ‘inoperative’ (2012, p. 151). Following Nancy, Shindo, sees that community is ‘a continuum of sharing’ (Shindo, 2012, p. 159) ‘ordering itself to the unworking of its communication’ (Nancy quoted in Shindo, 2012, p. 160). Recognizing the lack of workability, the lack in terms of communicability, is not a failure of community but an acknowledgement of nonsovereignty that is the precondition of commonality.

Here nonsovereignty does not entail defeatist stance towards politics, but receptiveness and affective attunement to the plurality of politics within the community and the shared commons. For Berlant ‘nonsovereign relationality’ is ‘the foundational quality of being in common’ (2016, p. 394) the ‘experience of affect, of being receptive, in real time’ (Berlant, 2016, p. 402). Michael Taussig resonates this idea of real-time receptive nonsovereignty in endorsing the mastery of non-mastery. For Taussig, the notion of mastery of non-mastery is akin to keeping true to the commonality as ongoing and pluralistic pedagogy and meaning making through ‘a more subtle engagement with the body and the body of the world’ (2020, p. 60). This keeps us responsive to the questions and questionability of how we inhabit commons and embody sociopolitical proximity to each other. This resonates with Haraway’s sense of response-ability as inhabiting togetherness ‘in unexpected collaborations and combinations’ (2016, p. 4). To keep tuned to our sense of nonsovereignty is to keep true to our collectivity and response-ability. Response-ability entails recognizing that the will, purpose and agenda of political action barely and rarely coincide with how these take shape and effect in the lived and embodied plurality of collectives. ‘Most of what we do, after all, involves not being purposive but inhabiting agency differently in small vacations from the will itself’ (Berlant, 2011, p. 116). Vacations ‘from will’ are not vacations from the social or the political but recognition of our nonsovereignty in the collective work of (re)production and (re)creation of our own subjectivity, meanings and wills.

Isin (2008) sees that political acts are not reducible to their will or intentionality: ‘responsibility and answerability may well contradict one another’ (p. 31). For Isin, the calculable aspect of an act (intentionality) does not exhaust the incalculable and unexpected answerability to that act (how that act is perceived, interpreted and responded to). Politics happen in scenes that actors do not only fully or wilfully constitute and direct. Instead, the ‘actor is produced through the scene and is constituted by the act itself’ (p. 34).

I trace how actors make scenes of community and how these scenes make actors. I trace how this happens by accident or design, in the shared proximity in a queer site of belonging. The modes of participation, belonging and the meanings of that belonging differed, diverged and sometimes clashed, but that did not mean that one mode trumped another. For Lee Edelman, ‘there are other models than trumping for thinking what happens when antithetical constructs appear beside each other’ (Berlant & Edelman, 2014, p. 59). The model I choose is the ‘montage’ (Taussig, 2020) where different realities are ‘juxtaposed’ (p. 37) to impinge on each other, and co-constitute each other rather than trump each other. Here, juxtaposition does not mean mere multiplicity of realities appearing side by side. Subjective realities and subjectivities do not trump each other but signal for multiple potentialities in each other, and in their common circumstance. My method is to mobilize the potentialities that arise in the juxtaposition of situated subjective realities and subjectivities in the corporeal and experiential proximity of community projects.

Methods and positionality: fieldwork at the limits of translatability

My position at the Organization was ambiguous, and my purpose was multiple. I was ‘a volunteer (as a translator), a participant (member of the group) and a researcher who writes about the group’. I betrayed the ambiguity and multiplicity of my roles by stating that at the beginning of each meeting. But whenever were these three roles unambiguously separate? Ethnography is translation and interpretation between the field and the research paper. That involves an interpretation of who is a participant and where the field and participation begin and end. The field was not coterminous with the activities and gatherings of the Organizations. We met each other, by accident and design, at other events. We sometimes exchanged phone numbers and kept in contact. To keep in contact with those in legal limbo meant the need to brace myself for complications in their legal situation and its psychological repercussions. I often found it uneasy to check up on how they were doing.

In November 2019, Karol a member from the Organization, told me that he was going to receive a decision about his application for asylum. I wanted to call and check up on his news, but kept postponing that. Meanwhile, he sent me an email, telling me that he ‘received a negative decision’ and that he was appealing. He wrote that the appeal was going to take a year. At the end of the short email, he mentioned having bought the coat he had intended to buy when we last met. He attached a photo of that, as if life was uninterrupted for him. I was surprised by his composure, or the performance of it. When I saw the email, I called him. In fact, the composure he showed in the email made it easier to call him; I felt reassured that I could handle a talk with him, that he was not broken-down, as I had witnessed with others in such cases before. He appreciated the call and said that he had not expected it. This made me feel confused about our relation, and our involvement in the same support group if a phone call was not expected in such cases. But he referred, by accident or design, to how I was indeed too nervous to call before I was encouraged by his reassuring composure in the email. At his appreciation and reassuring composure, I felt that I was on the receiving/supported side in the support group.

I met Karol a few days after he received the news about the rejection. We spoke about my research on solidarity. I asked whom he would feel and act in solidarity with. He said he felt solidarity towards ‘music producers’ because he himself ‘produced music’. Therefore he would ‘never download music illegally’. His statement came across as ironic or parodic, even if not directly intended to be so.

By accident or design, mockery or sincerity (or somewhere in between) Karol’s statements protested the academic involvement in (his) trouble. I dealt with the trouble of solidarity and community through research and texts. When it came to practice, I was overwhelmed at the idea of calling him when I felt solidarity with him was most urgent. Karol offered a parodic or mimetic example of solidarity. His parody was a mimesis of the mimesis of solidarity that he might have sensed around the academic me. Karol knew very well that I was writing about his trouble. I handled the trouble through my research and texts (what I produced). Karol questioned or protested, neither totally out of accident, nor totally out of design: we belong to the exiled rainbow family, but do we find more sense of attachment, affinity and sense of mooring and safety in what we produce individually? This is a (research) question, and a questioning of research, rather than a finding. Karol’s remarks created ambiguity that agitated crucial questions about our wider sociopolitical circumstance.

Following Miranda Joseph, I see community as a place of tackling tension, frustration and uncertainty and generating ‘creative thinking about the constitution of collective action’ (Joseph, 2002, vii). That is, rather than taking community as a separate entity, to ‘situate communities and the discourse of community in the social processes in which they are constituted and that they help to constitute’ (p. viii). Joseph foregrounds the need to do away with the self-evidence of community in order to recognize our nonsovereignty, our inability to capture and settle on a final meaning and form of community. Following that, I mobilize what Ruez and Cockayne call a position of ‘non-sovereignty’ (2021, p. 101) where the researcher is part of the plurality of the subjects contributing to the meaning making and the negotiation of purpose within the field (and the wider sociopolitical field). In this sense, an ethnography is a work of translation between the field(work) and the wider sociopolitical circumstance.

Therefore, my role as a translator (between languages at the support group), transcended in all means the literal and the semantic. It involved a rethinking possibilities and potentialities of acts and statements in the field and beyond. For Butler, translation entails dwelling with disorientation and ambiguity: ‘translation cannot be a simply assimilation of what is foreign into what is familiar; it must be an opening to the unfamiliar’ (2012, p. 12). Recognizing the plurality of meaning making requires unlearning our claims to academic mastery over narratives and meanings. It requires learning to unstructure our methodology in ways that allows previously unfamiliar structures and orders of analysis to take shape. That is to tune into the infrastructural order and disorder in order to find inspiration for difference. Isin (2008) suggests that ‘modern social and political thought [h]as been dominated by a concern with order rather than disruption’ (p. 25) Isin, emphasizes the necessity to pay attention to what is ‘a rupture in the given’ (p. 27). To trace the rupture in the given, Taussig’s methodology is to take breaks from the need to ‘create order out of disorder’ (p. 36). That for Taussig requires ‘a more cinematic and a less sociological mode of reckoning [,] a mode attuned to what is called montage, in which different realities and different images are juxtaposed one to the other’ (Taussig, 2020, p. 37). A cinematic approach allows necessary wanderings from too beaten paths of methodological and political valuations of what seems to be broken. A glitch, in the end, is not an individual failure, but a sign of an infrastructural failure (Berlant, 2016). A methodology that juxtaposes the researcher’s to the participant’s mode of reckoning gestures toward what is broken in their shared sociality.

Sharing the ‘infrastructure’ of, in and with the field is commonality in its cinematic and embodied mode, receptive, patient, and attentive, not hasty to draw judgements and conclusions. Living the field as a story, a movie, challenges the separations and dichotomies between the field and the conclusion. The communication between Karol and me cut across notions of researcher and subject and framed the lives of both as sites of a sociopolitical infrastructure and glitches. The glitch, a sign that something is broken in sociality, seen cinematically across divisions of labour (between researcher and musician), pointed rhetorically, metaphorically or deliberately to what is broken in our queer family, and how we convene a world together.

Solidarity beyond codes, organization and numbers

January 2021: The Corona pandemic had taken its toll on our patience and sense of sovereignty. It also monopolized most of our conversations in the meetings at the Organization. In one of these conversations, Gabriella protested the ongoing restrictions: ‘Corona was in the beginning now it is just a number. We see numbers but where is Corona? I do not see it!’ Other participants looked confused. Only Kadem agreed, and passionately. He was frustrated with the restrictions because they caused complications and delays in his asylum procedure. Earlier that day, he said that a long-awaited interview with migration officials was cancelled due to his flu symptoms. Now he had to book a new appointment and wait again. Kadem protested how the restrictions were ‘contradictory’: the Organization cancelled meetings and restricted number of participants to ten, meanwhile bars and clubs kept open and with minimum restrictions (compared to our group’s). But Kadem’s protests went out of synch with Gabriella when he said that he ‘believed Trump’, and that ‘Corona was invented in Chinese laboratories’. This is where the flow of their conversation abruptly stopped. Gabriella got up from the chair next to his, looking pained and offended, even defeated ‘Oh Man! I do not like this talk, I do not believe Trump’. Gabriella, who had just looked and sounded sure about her arguments, seemed to give up mastery at Kadem’s remark. She might have witnessed, and born witness to, how injurious claims of mastery can be, when done in a Trump-like rhetoric that claims unchallenged truth. At that moment, non-mastery and withdrawal was more politically urgent and sensible than claims to (or promises of) truth.

Later that day Hani, the coordinator, brought up the issue of number limits in the group meetings. Hani said that some new members were going to join, but the challenge was how to organize participation in a fair way: ‘should we set a day for newcomers?’ Natacha said that newcomers might be in dire need to join. David said that the concept of ‘newcomer’ imposed hierarchies. Gabriella said, ‘if we specify a date for newcomers we would look more organized’. David and Natacha looked uncomfortable with Gabriella’s seemingly inconsiderate (or intentionally provocative) comment. Gabriella’s comment sounded too provocative. However, it highlighted how we (claimed to) handle the Corona pandemics through ‘numbers’ and limitations that paradoxically and parodically made us feel ‘more organized’, feel better about our organization and Organization.

Gabriella, by accident or design, parodied our politics that have become too compliant and complacent with ‘numbers’. If these meetings were direly needed, if they were the family for many, why do our politics and activism shrink to discussions about numbers and limitations? Why do we repeat and endorse hegemonic claims of scarcity that required queer families to restrict and encouraged businesses to expand? And then we speak about the ‘hierarchies’ evoked by terms like ‘newcomer’! Gabriella’s statement seemed, in Berlant’s terms, like a ‘sideways glance [of] the knowing who refuse to reproduce the conversation that never shifts the scene of living’ (2016, p. 412).

Gabriella’s ambiguous remarks signalled a glitch in our sociality and family. Ruez and Cockayne (2021) call for ‘an ambivalent position’ (p. 88) that honours our non-mastery over valuation of affects, stances and claims over their political trajectory. In line with that, I am interested in how that very skepticism, confusion and dissent over politics, by accident or design, marks and landmarks our political landscape to signal for directions we might discount or prematurely (or pre-politically) judge and define. Rose (1997) sees that community based on the idea of ‘lack’ can be a ‘radical tactic’ (p. 7). Gabriella did not only point out the lack (or loss) that our group/family/community experienced when it was heavily and disproportionately impacted by the pandemic and the lockdown. She also highlighted our complacency with discourses and narratives that discounted groups like ours in their considerations in the urgency of the pandemic. She exposed our complacency, lethargy and complicity to our political marginality. For Rose (1997) marginality is not an inherent quality of the marginalized, but a byproduct of how norms of power allocate resources, ‘including even the resources to articulate an identity’ (p. 14). As if Juxtaposed with Kadem’s earlier statements about ‘how contradictory the restrictions were’, Gabriella’s remarks highlighted our queer family’s marginality to capitalism and nation-states, especially when some of us endorsed their tenets based on numbers, scarcities and contradictory restrictions.

I am not sure if other participants saw Gabriella’s and Kadem’s acts this way. And this is the point. The idea here is not to achieve surety, but to inhabit the scene and tune into potentialities within the juxtaposition of different realities, subjectivities and feelings. In sites of community politics, intentionality and potentialities are not coincident or coterminous (Shindo, 2018).

Deviance, for Cohen, is not a wish to become an outsider. Instead it is to reclaim autonomy over one’s life, a refusal to adapt completely or conform (2004). Gabriella’s, Karol’s and Kadem’s comments and acts deviated by accident or design from the norms in our community, they might have figured as failure in community and communication, but they enacted their autonomy. Moreover, by enacting that divergent autonomy in the proximity of other members, they agitated and challenged the norms and structure of community and communication. The site of community, its infrastructure, does not collapse when an oppressive or limiting structure of communication does. Instead, it gives way to different structures of communication and community.

For Shindo, home and belonging do not necessarily denote comfort and security, but emerge with ‘their own dilemmatic emotional terrain’ (2021, p. 431). For participants in my ethnography, and for me, belonging meant the possibility and responsibility handle the dilemmatic and ambiguous emotional terrain at community sites. That is when community is not understood as a machine-like organization, but a lively organism (Rose, 1997) within spatiality and proximity that does not give form to an ‘essence’, but to a ‘body politics [that is] creative and full of energy’ (Rose, 1997, p. 10).

Conclusion: queer politics refuses conclusions

Queer pioneers in the mobilization of the intimate and the mundane to challenge norms of politics and community. The queer support group in this study, was a site to mobilize and potentialize the mundane. Members’ proximity actualized and potentialized queer and marginal meanings and modes of expression of community, belonging and solidarity. Queer, deviant and defiant methodology of politics and alliance and research on these keep tuned to the injurious and machinized work of definition and definitiveness. Definition might involve boundaries of belonging or boundaries of how we valuate political acts. Sites and projects of community often entail boundaries of who is eligible and what is legible as politics. This might curb an organic and dynamic politics that speak to the changing concerns and circumstance communities and community projects that are created to tackle in the first place. Troubling norms of legibility is urgent in queer politics. My ethnography delved into the very ambiguity of legibility and eligibility that happened at sites of proximity of queer spaces and projects. Proximity at sites of community and commonality necessitated working through breakdowns and ambiguities in meaning and purpose of acts and statements. This breakdown generated divergent, deviant paths out of the political impasse. The breakdown, the glitch signalled new directions when a singular glitch reflected a collective one that have been overlooked. In this text, I mobilized ambiguities of identification and political valuations into political generativity. I have also shown how actuality, factuality and potentiality of acts are no conterminous. In the lived corporeal and experiential proximity within the support group where I did my fieldwork, proximity triggered different potentials of how to do and understand politics and solidarity. Through ambiguities in acts and statements, and through blurring the line between cinematic and sociological gaze, singular ambiguities signalled towards urgent narratives of the collective. Cinematic did not mean fictional. To the contrary, it kept true to the multiple potentialities of dissonance, hesitation and the uncertainty in alliances and communities and challenged the oppressive uniformity that we experience in these. Our political lenses and analyses of Self and Other (and each other) often reflect a wider structural and infrastructural brokenness that we need to attend to. That is queer politics keeping queer, deviant from and defiant to conclusions and boundaries, but always response-able to what has been discounted by norms of science and activism.

Approval of Ethics Committee

University of Helsinki Ethical Review Board in Humanities and Social and Behavioral Sciences Lausunto/Statement 55/2020.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

Research Council of Finland funded Centre of Excellence in Law, Identity and the European Narratives, Funding decision numbers 336678 & 353311. Academy of Finland [1336678].

Notes on contributors

Ali Ali

Ali Ali is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. Ali’s research tackles issues of queer politics and community in exile.

Notes

1 The terms ‘member’ and ‘participant’ are interchangeable in this text. I only reference group members who participated wilfully (and actively) in the discussions and activities of the support group and in this research.

2 I have discussed this in my doctoral thesis (Ali, 2023b).