In “Sex in Public,” Berlant and Warner argue that queer culture should go beyond creating spaces for sexual encounters and offer “changed possibilities of identity, intelligibility, publics, culture, and sex that appear when the heterosexual couple is no longer the referent or the privileged example of sexual culture.”[1] In 2007, I had the privilege of experiencing the “changed possibilities” of a non-heteronormative space when I attended Queeruption 10, a seven-day queer anarchist gathering on Vancouver Island.[2] Queeruption, which takes place in a different city each year, brings together queers from all over the world in an attempt to “challenge the racist, sexist, classist, consumer-oriented gay mainstream.”[3] Over the course of a week, the hundreds of participants functioned as a single organizational body, making decisions in consensus-based meetings and cooking all meals communally. The goal of Queeruption is to put theory into practice, and work to create the queer community that Berlant and Warner envision. Queeruption also serves to decentralize heterosexuality by creating a utopian environment in which so-called deviant sexual acts and identities are the norm.
Attending Queeruption helped me realize the extent to which personal identity is shaped by cultural forces. At the time when I attended the gathering, I identified as heterosexual; although I had often experienced same-sex desire, I had never thought to question my perceived heterosexual orientation. Over the course of the week, however, as I experienced being immersed in an alternative social structure, my conception of self seemed to shift and expand. Berlant and Warner note that “[h]eteronormativity is more than ideology, or prejudice, or phobia against gays and lesbians”; it is produced by the structure and forms of everyday society.[4] In contrast to downtown Vancouver’s strict and binary gender system, racist, classist and sexist subtext, emphasis on monogamy and support of capitalism, Queeruption’s queer world valued and encouraged androgyny, gender play and drag, never assuming pronouns, being conscious of one’s privilege and position, polyamory, and non-hierarchy. Featuring workshops on alternative relationship models, zine making, queers of colour and white privilege, femme identity, and mental health, Queeruption aimed to create a “safer space” where self-identified queers could explore and confront the possibilities and difficulties inherent in living outside the heterosexual mainstream.
Despite its attempts at inclusivity, Queeruption 2007 unintentionally perpetuated the racist and imperialist behaviours to which it is ideologically opposed. The gathering was held on Shishalh land; although this was acknowledged in printed material and discussed in several decolonization workshops, many participants expressed concern that a small collective of white Canadians had invited hundreds of international attendees to a festival held on stolen land. Because the festival was held outdoors and participants were expected to sleep in tents, accessibility was an issue. Additionally, certain attendees of colour felt uncomfortable in the space, which was white-dominated; many individuals pointed out that the absence of queers of colour reflected the dominance of whites in the queer and GLBTQ community at large. Despite the “radical” intent of the festival, the majority of the participants conformed to a specific androgynous beauty ideal, favouring young, white, able-bodied, slim, tattooed, masculine-presenting bodies over those that were feminine-presenting, non-white, or differently abled.
Heteronormativity is so subtle and so pervasive that it can best be noticed by omission. At Queeruption, submerged in an entirely new, queer-centric society with different values and norms, I experienced the “changed possibilities of identity” firsthand.[5] The radical queer culture I experienced in 2007 made a deep impression on me, destabilizing the labels I had placed on myself and allowing for a more fluid identification. Queer spaces challenge the assumption that heterosexuality is ideal, and make room for “the development of kinds of intimacy that bear no necessary relation to domestic space, to kinship, to the couple form, to property, or to the nation.”[6] However, one must keep in mind that it is easy to reproduce power structures, even within an alternative subculture. If queer communities are dominated by white, middle-class, privileged people—no matter how well-intentioned they may be—they run the risk of reproducing oppressions rather than dismantling them.
1. Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 3.
3. Queeruption Vancouver 2007, “Info,” Queeruption Vancouver 2007, http://www.queeruption.org/q10vancouver2007/queeruption.html (accessed October 22, 2009).
4. Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 9-10.
5. Berlant and Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 3.
