Multimodal un/composition's queer performativity: curating queer zines and a politics of im/possibility
by Cody A. Jackson, Texas Christian University
Abstract
I find myself out of words for an abstract. In lieu of what one might call a “traditional” abstract, I want to ask, “how might it feel to write at the end of a world?” I write “a world” and not “the world” because there was never one world. Worlds end every second. Worlds begin every second. I write this alongside sick and disabled people who are actively resisting state-sanctioned violence and ableist systems of oppression right now. Right now. Right now. Right now. The immediacy of this violence cannot be overestimated. These zines are incomplete. Amid widespread pressure to recuperate the pieces of ourselves that have been torn, I want us to consider spending time and creating spaces of healing out of the scraps and discursive remains. As opposed to a composition that intends to ever be whole or fully elaborated, these zines come undone at the seams. In the words of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha in Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, “I remember that we are not the first to remember these connections, why our people were murdered, and fight like hell to end this world that wants us dead.”