Queer Ethics

One of the things I got to wondering about when we were out at Alma: where is the queer in my piece? Thoughts from my college-era women's studies classes kept chasing each other around in my head: Does the piece need to have a queer character to have a queer presence? Isn't a it queer piece because I'm writing it? Do I write queer? What does a queer aesthetic mean? Does there have to be sex? (Now that's not a question I usually ask! María's shift of "have to" to "get to" would maybe be good here!)

And then Ana started talking about remembering what queer meant when we first came out. And then I read this, from a link off Ana's blog. (Thank you, Ana!)

It is depth of radical imaginary possibility that has been made possible through the very fact of subjection that is the place of ethics. Which is to say most simply that a group of people that is subject to norms must, in order to survive, come up with new ways of existence. Wherever there are limits there is an imagination of transgressing these limits -- and that is the radical potential of being queer. That our entire lives are basically a series of limits, and the fact of having all those limits in that kind of distance from the moral centre of the world, forces us, enables us, and allows us to imagine things constantly. That is the ethical possibility of being queer.

Last night I watched Adelina enact this. Adelina, with her reimagined Dick Cheney, with her story of that man (as my grandmother would refer, when necessary, to J.C.), and Magdalena/Mary Magdalene. Completely immoral. Utterly ethical.