Continuing my attack on neat categorizations of gendered bodies, I want to round out parts 1 & 2 with an exploratory focus on the queer body’s generative capabilities in (re)shaping spaces, borrowing insights from phenomenology and affect theory. If identity categories are untenable, and language reappropriation has helped in the process of showing their instability, how does the moving queer body complicate this understanding? Earlier, I spoke of ruptures and a perpetual becoming and wish to continue this line of thought. I offer my third thesis: queered gestures are an amalgamation of aesthetic, kinesthetic, and discursive protocols which radically change the body’s potentialities.  

Invoking my slaying of Albert Heijn’s aisles from Queer, Elusive, I was signaling a specific and a general example of a queer experience in a visibly discontinuous body. Also, that body is sartorially stylized and has a certain gait, a rhythmic one. The legacies of words, slurs, and categories are  ascribed to it and etched onto it. This is where the aesthetic and kinesthetic reveal the discursive dimension. I use discourse in the way French philosopher Michel Foucault used it – as constructing systems of thought, language, and social practices which shape and regulate what can be said, thought, or understood within a particular historical or cultural context. It encompasses not only verbal or written communication but also non-verbal forms of expression, such as gestures, images, and institutional practices. 

Discourse, then, produces subjects who are positioned and constituted by the discursive practices that govern their lives. Through processes of subjectification, individuals come to internalize and embody the norms and values encoded within discursive formations, shaping their identities, desires, and behaviors. For any Foucauldian analysis, this has to be viewed through a lens of power that operates through the production and regulation of knowledge. It gets a little trickier when you consider that dominant discourse often serves to reinforce existing power structures and marginalize alternative ways of knowing and/or being. 

I offered a very cursory breakdown of one of the most cited academics in humanities disciplines, so I can complicate the grocery-aisle-slaying-dimension which some queers possess. Naturally, the example I draw from is an illustration of recurring events from my own life and I am in no way pretending it to be a totality of “the queer experience”. Based on what I discuss in my previous contributions, a fair note of commonsensical intuition, and a reasonable infatuation with queer theory, it is pretty safe to assume that there is no such thing as “the” queer experience anyway. Thus, we are still on track with the attack on totalizing notions of subjectivity.  

I bring up the example of getting groceries to point at how the mundanity of the experience is intertwined with a mundanity of queer subject marginalization. In my illustration, the boring practice of picking up the Dutch lunch combo of bread and kaas in the supermarket becomes affectively charged, since the non-normativity of the queer body collides into someone else’s discomfort. This collision is sometimes verbalized or accompanied with vitriolic gestures and gazes, almost always leaving the queer in a state of precarity. As if the pain and melancholia of occupying normative spaces was not enough already, now the queer also must be even more vigilant to avoid possible escalation of the situation. 

The minutiae of these collisions is a wealth of affect, which are in affect theory understood as dynamic and relational sensations, arising from the interactions between bodies, environments, and social contexts. Unlike emotions, which are often tied to specific cognitive appraisals or beliefs, affects are more immediate and visceral, operating at a pre-conscious level. They are intense and fleeting, influencing perceptions and actions in ways that may be difficult to articulate or rationalize. Here is where linguistics shows a limitation; as I am writing about the nature of this collision, I assume the reader can have a pre-discursive understanding of the weight these exchanges carry, due to their affective nature. You do not need to have lived through such situations to have an ingrained and physical sense of tension emanating in your body when reading or hearing about such instances. It creeps up on you, viscerally. 

What I am aiming at with this final part of my 3-part contribution is not to regurgitate how some of us still have a hard time navigating a social context seriously intent on pointing out how disruptive we are. Rather, by exploring the tensions in this affectively charged exchange I want to show how contingent they are on a sustained ideology with shoddy foundations substantiating it. In other words: the unstable and untenable categories that are socially dominant, come into their positions by repeatedly and violently asserting themselves towards any type of non-normativity which is perceived as rupturing.  

However, I brought notions of aesthetic and kinesthetic into this conversation for a reason. In this context, I treat aesthetics as it is treated in philosophy – as the ways in which we perceive, interpret, and respond to aesthetic phenomena. This includes the role of perception, imagination, emotion, and cognition in shaping our aesthetic responses. Such an experience is often characterized by qualities like intensity, immersion, and transcendence, which evoke profound emotional and intellectual engagement. On the other hand, kinesthetics is in philosophy broadly defined as the study of bodily movement, sensation, and proprioception—the sense of one’s own body in motion. 

In the branch of phenomenology, the embodied nature of human experience is central. A key tenet of the phenomenological tradition is that our perception of the world is fundamentally shaped by our bodily engagement with it. Rather than viewing the body as a mere object in the world, phenomenologists highlight the lived body as the primary site of meaning and understanding. Through bodily movement and sensation, we come to inhabit and experience the world in a direct and immediate manner. This is why I investigate embodied cognition in queer experience: because of the ways in which bodily practices and gestures are simultaneously mediated by their aesthetics, their movement protocol, and the discursive milieu in which they are situated.  

In Queer, Elusive the productive aspect of linguistic reappropriation is juxtaposed with a material queer experience. With this post, I expand on the mundane to show how generative the movements of queers in the wild truly are. A simple quotidian moment can become a situation constituted by an affectively charged exchange between queer(s) and their spectator(s). The act of looking, gazing, staring, eyeing is much less subtle than imagined. It is accompanied by eyebrow-raising, frowning, expressions of confusion. A single moment can pack so much. A queer body’s gaiety of motion, or the ferocity and type of strut, show incredible command of space. The fabrics that drape and move with the queer body are co-conspirators in the project; they are an extension, a shield, an imagination of a subject deciding their own bounds. Once the queer subject is perceived, the room has already changed. The supermarket, town-square, or doctor’s office suddenly have a sharper awareness to them, they have been transformed from mundane to an indeterminate space; they are now not governed anymore by the same protocols as they were pre-queer. The intensity of the affective charge changes the room and the people in it, for better or worse. Perception of the moving body shapes the exchange. How I am looked at affects my movement protocol, which in turn changes what I emanate as I maneuver the scene.  

It is possible to read this scenario in infinite ways, but what I want to stress is a generative quality of a queer body. Its presence and movement consistently re-negotiate itself and its relationality to other subjects. In so doing, I have the option to choose which aspect of me will be magnified today…. Who is she? You see, it is not only that identity categories and the language we deploy to delineate them are insufficient, they are unimaginative. Exploring bodily cognition, playing with adornment, attuning to the contours of a shifting kinesthetics; these processes ask more of everyone involved, but they breed far richer experience. In Queer, Unstable I was interested in the ways in which a queer body defies categories and in Queer, Elusive I engaged with a linguistic shift that helped expand the term’s understanding. 

For Queer, Perpetual I stressed the interplay of the kinesthetic, affective, aesthetic, and discursive modalities. By engaging playfully with my perceived ruptures, I grant my body possibilities. The repeated attempts to control the queer body into slow assimilation leave residuals and write a history of tension onto it. Yet, historia est magistra vitae, history is the teacher of life, it informs and offers insight. Through an embodied perception, then, my queer history has taught me to keep poeticizing my expression(s), in that way I pervade any space I come into and permeate it with all my being. I partake in a type of objectification, but it’s not the kind where I am an object as it is colloquially understood. No. 

It’s more like pushing the limits of how my body is perceived, how it moves, how it looks, how it engages with its environment. Because these processes generate affect, I can never fully embody being just an object. That option was never truly on the table.