A Discursive Walk
2016-05-19T04:51:15+00:00A Discursive Walk
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一个Women\'s Studies and Urban Studies课的prototype project. 关键词:heteronormativity, queer time and queer space, everyday urbanism. 用了Adobe After Effects Track Camera feature.
Project statement:
What does a queer spatial intervention mean? Does queerness necessarily connote sexuality? If so, how does one assert the privacy of sex onto the public sphere of a college campus? But how is queer confined to sexuality studies? By stabilizing queerness, or normalizing it, do we also lose the provocative and transgressive nature of queer studies as well? In the process of visualizing and prototyping my queer spatial intervention, these core questions, which are often asked by seminal theorists in queer studies, are also at the heart of this spatial intervention.
Heteronormativity, which Siobhan B. Somerville considers one of the key issues of queer studies, is first proposed by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner in their thought-provoking piece “Sex in Public.” They cautiously warn us not to confuse heteronormativity with heterosexuality. In their formulation, heteronormativity means “the institution, structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent – that is, organized as a sexuality – but also privileged.” Therefore, those institutions and practices that are less sexual, such as raising kids, going to a gendered bathroom, or running for president, are nonetheless under the hegemonies of the heteronormative culture. Berlant and Warner further argues that “It is hard to see these fields as heteronormative because the sexual culture straight people inhabit is so diffuse, a mix of languages they are just developing with premodern notions of sexuality so ancient that their material conditions feel hardwired to personhood.” Much of queer studies’ project is to deconstruct heteronormative regimes that regulate and reproduce heteronormative subjects. Berlant and Warner’s project, however, is also to assert the relevance private sexuality in the public social sphere that seems far removed from anything “sexual.” And as Somerville summarized, queer studies has seen itself dislocating from its fixation the sexual and relocating to a broad critique of the social in general.
Therefore, a public spatial practice, such as walking, can also be “queered.” Although the temporality (when to walk) and geography (where to walk) of walking might connote nothing sexual on the surface, the heteronormative hegemonies might be so deeply embedded in choosing when and where to walk that we are not aware how, as Berlant and Warner put it, these “material conditions feel hardwired to personhood.” J. Jack Halberstam characterizes queer temporality as an alternative structuring of time that “lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience – namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death.” (2) Halberstam sees a “queer” adjustment of time and space not just as sexual practice, but also inventive life schedules, nonnormative spatial interventions, and so on. The queering of space and time in this sense, I argue, is markedly different from the heteronormative rendering of temporality and geography, which oftentimes emphasize efficiency and time/space compression. A remarkable effect, therefore, is when we walk around campus, we only focus on the origin and the destination, and neglecting walking itself as a political and potentially queer practice, reducing the time it takes to walk to numerical “minutes” and the space we walk in to mathematical “lines.”
So, my prototype taps into this hegemonic configuration of the spatial and temporal practice of walking. I intend to disrupt the temporal and spatial normativity that governs when and where people walk on this campus. This prototype speculates a person who walks by Blodgett and toward Kenyon. Their headphones are on, so spatial intervention needs visual assertiveness to capture their attention. I quote from Judith Butler, “I thought we should take this walk together,” to presume a disembodied presence that speaks to them assertively and invitingly. If this person accepts the invitation, they are guided by minimal numbers of arrows and signs that hovers in the air or grows from the ground to shape up a rough walking route, along which the walker has considerable amount of freedom to reinvent their walking path. This rough route intentionally deviates from the built path, and later also cuts across multiple designated walking and driving paths, effectively disrupts the spatial design that is followed by most walkers on campus. A series of questions is asked along the way:
Have you felt moments of joy, love, or peace today?
Are these moments short? Too Short? Why can\'t they be longer?
What\'s stopping you? The work? The routine? The expectations?
Why not take a break, and think about it?
YOUR CHOICE
These questions lead up to a decision that is posed to the walker, tempting them to choose between a presupposed life schedule that disallows them to take on this walk further and a disrupting and, perhaps, illuminating rethinking of such schedule.
My hope is, even if the walker does not choose to walk on further into a part of campus that is not usually visited by campus residents, this walk will still leave a mark, as if a small punctuation from the daily rhythm that temporarily releases the walker from the monotonous day. This hope is similar to what Margaret Crawford refers to, and what Henri Lefebvre theorizes as, “a third category of time, the discontinuous and spontaneous moments that punctuate daily experience – fleeting sensations of love, play, rest, knowledge.” This formulation of temporality also resonates with the moments of ecstasy that José Esteban Muñoz sees as a queer temporal organizing against the straight time’s tenacious focus on the present. Muñoz argues that this ecstasy brings together the past, the present, and the future, stepping “out of the past and remarks upon the unity of an expansive version of temporality.” Therefore, the walker is offered a chance to build upon this disrupting walking experience and reformulate their perspective on and understanding of the walking life on this campus; and not just walking, also the waking, the working, the washing, the waiting, the writing lives, and so on so forth.
So this prototype prompts participants to deconstruct the heteronormative organizing of time and space through a discursive three-minute walk. This walk is an intentional and political act to counter the heteronormative hegemonic public. In the sense of queer counterpublics, as Berlant and Warner suggests, a queer world-making project is thus possible and accessible through this discursive walk. Berlant has lamented upon the extremely limiting model of intimacy and why a queer reimagining of “life” is “so easily unimaginable.” This prototype asks the same question, and poses the same challenge to “life.”
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