Objeto de la intervención

Sometimes, whether or not you are asked a question, you feel questionable. Maybe you have been questioned too many times; you come to expect it; you begin to live your life as a question. You feel like a question mark; you feel marked by questions. Sometimes you might be asked questions because of who you are with; or how you are with who you are with. So many times, I have been asked when I enter a local shop with my girlfriend, “Is she your sister?” Who is she? Is it a way of saying, what is your relationship? A relationship can be questionable. Sister: a way of seeing or not seeing lesbian? Sister: a way of evoking an intimacy without naming it, sister as euphemism? A lesbian couple were asked by their newly arrived neighbors, “What are you?” A relationship can appear like a willful object, something that obtrudes, stands out.

When you are heterosexual you might not be asked to explain how you became heterosexual. When you come out as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, you might be asked to give an account of yourself. The sciences of sexology institutionalized this demand: How can we explain perversion? What are the origins of perversion? Who are the perverts? Are you a pervert? Or maybe we could say: in becoming a pervert, you become the one who is questionable, the one whose biography becomes testimony. Every bit of you can become a revelation.

When you deviate from a straight line, it is the deviation that has to be explained. In Queer Phenomenology, I shared an anecdote about being asked a question, this time by a neighbor. Let me share this anecdote again.

I arrive home. I park my car and walk toward the front door. A neighbor calls out to me. I look up, somewhat nervously. I have yet to establish good relations with the neighbors. I haven’t lived here very long, and the semipublic of the street does not feel easy yet. She mumbles some words, which I cannot hear, and then asks, “Is that your sister, or your husband?” I don’t answer and rush into the house.

There are two women, living together, a couple of people alone in a house. So what do you see? The first question reads the two women as sisters. By seeing us as siblings, the question constructs us as alike:

like sisters. In this way, the reading both avoids the possibility of lesbianism and also stands in for it, insofar as it repeats the familiar construction of lesbian couples as siblings: lesbians are sometimes represented as if they could be sisters because of their family resemblance. The fantasy of the likeness of

sisters (which is a fantasy in the sense that we search for likeness as a sign of a biological tie) takes the place of another fantasy, that of the lesbian couple as being alike, and so alike that they even threaten to merge into one body. Once when I shared this anecdote at a conference, a woman in the audience remarked, “But that is amazing—you’re a different race!” While I wouldn’t put it quite like that, the comment spoke to me. My girlfriend is white. I am brown. Seeing us as alike or as like sisters meant overlooking signs of difference.

The move from the first question to the second question, without any pause or without waiting for an answer, is fascinating and even now still fascinates me. If not sister, then husband. The second question rescues the speaker, by positing the partner not as female (which even in the form of the sibling risks exposure of what does not get named), but as male. The figure of “my husband” operates as a legitimate sexual other, the other half, a sexual partner with a public face. Or the question could have been a more playful one, in which the figure of the husband was not necessarily a reference to “male”: that is, the husband could refer to the butch lover. The butch lover would be visible in this address only insofar as she took the place of the husband. Either way, the utterance rereads the oblique form of the lesbian couple, in the way that straightens that form such that it appears straight. Indeed, it is not even that the utterances move from a queer angle to a straight line. The sequence of the utterances offers two readings of the lesbian couple, both of which function as straightening devices: if not sisters, then husband and wife.

It is a long time since that moment. But when we walk down the street, questions still follow us. Or should I say, questions follow her, and me, as part of us, one of two. “Are you a boy or a girl?” they ask her, this time, a question that drips with mockery and hostility. A question hovering around gender: not being housed by gender, being unhoused by gender. Some of these questions dislodge you from a body that you yourself feel you reside in. Once you have been asked these questions, you wait for them; waiting to be dislodged changes your relation to the lodge. Gender could be redescribed in concrete terms of accommodation.

You might not be at home in an existing assignment. In order to be at home, you might have to become insistent. If you are transgender and / or gender nonconforming, you might have to insist on being “he” or

“she” or “not he” or “not she” when you are assigned the wrong pronoun; you might have to keep insisting because you are not heard when you indicate your preferences. To be in a same-sex relationship can also involve experiencing the pronoun as a struggle, one that is both personal and political: when your partner is assumed to be “he” or “she,” you have to correct the assumption, and the very act of correction is heard as a requirement, an imposition or a demand on others. Heard as a requirement: there is a history abbreviated here of how the modifications required for some to be are heard as making demands on others. This is how political correctness is used: as the imposition of an order that regulates the behavior of others. For some to be is to become an imposition or restriction on the freedom of others. It is exhausting, this labor, which is required because certain norms are still at work in how people are assumed to be and to gather. We also learn: the desire for a more normal life does not necessarily mean identification with norms, but can be a desire to avoid the exhaustion of having to insist just to exist.

If you do not inhabit existing norms, it can be uncomfortable. I often think through the politics of comfort through chairs: furniture is always good to think with. Think of how it feels to be comfortable:

say you are sinking into a comfortable chair. Comfort is about the fit between body and object: my comfortable chair might be awkward for you with your differently shaped body. Comfort is about an encounter between more than one body; the promise of a sinking feeling. Heteronormativity functions as a form of public comfort by allowing bodies to extend into spaces that have already taken their shape.

Those spaces are lived as comfortable, as they allow bodies to fit in; the surfaces of social space are already impressed upon by the shape of such bodies (like a chair that acquires its shape by the repetition of some bodies inhabiting it: we can almost see the shape of bodies as impressions in the surface). Spaces extend bodies and bodies extend spaces; the impressions acquired by surfaces function as traces of such

extensions. Gill Valentine (1996, 49) shows how the “heterosexualisation” of public spaces such as streets is naturalized by the repetition of different forms of heterosexual conduct (images on billboards, music played, displays of heterosexual intimacy, etc.), a process that often goes unnoticed by heterosexual subjects. Streets record the repetition of acts, and the passing by of some bodies and not others.

Heteronormativity also becomes a form of comforting: one feels better through the warmth of being faced by a world one has already taken in. One does not notice this as a world when one has been shaped by that world, and has even acquired its shape. Norms may not only have a way of disappearing from view, but can also be that which we do not consciously feel. If you do not inhabit heterosexuality, when faced by the comforts of heterosexuality you may feel uncomfortable (the body does not sink into a space that has already taken its shape). Queers might be asked not to make others feel uncomfortable, by not displaying any signs of queer intimacy. You might be asked to tone it down, or you might decide to tone it down to avoid creating discomfort. The availability of comfort for some bodies may depend on the labor of others, and the burden of concealment.

Who are you, what are you, explain yourself. A question can have a mood: a pointed sharp utterance thrown at you can throw you. And a question can be addressed to you, as if you yourself are in a mood, or are moody. Someone might say, “What’s up?” Or they might say, “What’s wrong?” Maybe this question comes out of intimacy: she asks, “What’s up?” because she can tell something is wrong by the intonation in your voice, by your expression. But not always: we can get it wrong about whether something is wrong.

If the question can find a feeling, it can give form to a feeling. You might not experience anything as being up; you might not feel down. And then: being asked what’s up, as if something is up, can bring you down.

Nothing, you say grumpily. And then you enact the truth of the judgment by contradicting the judgment; to find as to form.

When you are asked what’s wrong, it might refer to your disposition; your face and your body are judged as declaring something wrong. And you might be declaring something wrong. But the question

“What’s wrong with you?” is not always asked with reference to mood or disposition. A question can be a situation. Maybe you are in a hospital, a place you go when something is wrong with you. Rights and wrongs can be health issues. In becoming ill, you have to give an account of yourself. This is what’s wrong with me.

A question can be what does not fall. Maybe when a wrong becomes a question, a right becomes an idea. You are wrong because you are not right; something is not right. A right body might be fully functioning; a right body is upright; an able body. A new baby arrives: to confirm everything is right, toes and fingers are checked.

All present

She is all present

All the fingers, all the toes: a perfect normal child; the right child. As Rosemary Garland-Thomson notes, with reference to Andrew Solomon’s work, a disabled child might become a foreigner or stranger to a family. The disabled child becomes the wrong child: “This does not mean that disabled people are unloved or unaccepted within families or communities, but it suggests another way that congenital or early-onset disability can be understood as some version of wrongness, often a benevolent wrongness, because it violates the anticipated continuity of sameness as non disabled status within families. In other words, the seeming wrongness of congenital disability lies in the narrative that the family has got the wrong child, a changeling for the non disabled child who was expected” (2014, n.p.). An expectation of a nondisabled child makes the disabled child the wrong child. When your being is wrong, you are wronged.

Garland-Thomson also notes how disabled subjects are perpetually asked the question, “What’s wrong with you?” The question that asks what is wrong makes a wrong into an account. Part of the experience of disability is the requirement to give an account of oneself as an account of how things went wrong. An answer might be: I was born this way. Garland-Thomson notes that even those with congenital disabilities

become disabled when they are not accommodated by an environment. This is how histories become concrete, as I discuss in more detail in chapter 6. If environments are built to enable some bodies to do what they can, environments can be what stops bodies from doing: a cannot is how some bodies meet an environment.

How one answers the question “What’s wrong?” matters. A wrong that is made personal (what’s wrong with you) can be shown to be a matter of how a person inhabits an environment (it is wrong for me). It might be that we cannot avoid questions: this is what it means to be in question. The political struggle then becomes: to find a better way of answering the questions, ways of questioning the questions, so that the world that makes some beings into questions becomes what we question.