The comfort of in/visibility or rethinking the (post-soviet) ‘queer closet’

Activity: Talks and presentationsTalk or oral contributionScience to Public

Description

In this short presentation I will revisit the concept of the ‘closet’ for the current realities of the post-soviet context from a queer and feminist perspective. The ‘closet’ has acquired a shameful and backward connotation in the ‘West’ and beyond. I will start my deliberations with two observations: First, contemporary – Western oriented – global queer political culture favors individualized visual representation to fight for social acceptance; and second, in many post-soviet and Western contexts this form of visibility is increasingly threatened by right-wing (and often state sanctioned) violence. Accordingly, many queer individuals choose strategies to sustain their queer lives beyond visibility and public representation. However, queer and feminist theory does not offer adequate concepts to account for and describe these forms of resistance.

I build my reconfiguration of the gay closet on the decolonial and anti-imperialist philosopher Éduard Glissant and his demand for the right to opacity, and on prior queer theory that rethinks the gay closet on a textual or poetic level for example by Nicholas De Villiers. While these thinkers use the concept of opacity primarily on the level of the verbal, the poetic and textual, I will re-conceptualize the closet on the level of visual discourses. Engaging in a conversation with the artistic practice of the visual artists Ruthia Jenrbekova and Masha Godovannaya, I will show how the concept of the closet as ‘magic closet’ could offer the possibility to facilitate coalitions beyond identity politics based on nationality, sexuality and/or gender, creating forms of acceptance that are not structured through the violence of disclosure, normativity and categorization.
Period16 Apr 2021
Held atResearch Platform GAIN - Gender: Ambivalent In_Visibilities
Degree of RecognitionInternational