Littoral

“At the core of homonormativity is an erotics of whiteness, which designates some bodies as undesirable, too submerged in the dirty waters of signification to rescue. This was one of the hardest lessons to learn—that a persecuted people could reinscribe the violence of ontological shaming. Judith Butler probes the limits of “outness”. “Who is represented by which use of the term (queer], and who is excluded? For whom does the term present an impossible conflict between racial, ethnic, or religious affiliation and sexual politics? What kinds of policies are enabled by what kinds of usages, and which are backgrounded or erased from view?” Queers who ride the advantageous waves of whiteness slide smoothly into the depths of the norma-tive. This is done at the expense of racial flourishing. On dating apps, where white men hide behind a veil of anonymity but discriminate out in the open, this identity crisis wages on- “NO FATS, NO FEMS, NO ASIANS” is a banner under which white men build a dystopia. I could recite the vulgar speech that's been hurled at me, but I won't. There's too much to mine in them from those who feed, like vampires, on the spoils of injurious information. Of course this doesn't negate the violence entirely—it lingers as a spectre, tied to the bank of memories we have about vicious language. Perhaps that spectre is politically volatile enough to arouse a sense of injustice to end the slow making of a queer future replete with racism. Maggie Nelson: “And what kind of madness is it anyway, to be in love with something constitutionally incapable of loving you back?” Has anyone ever managed not to mould the body into an archive of their own degradation?”

— Billy-Ray Belcourt, A History of My Brief Body, pp. 68-9