Academic Readings | Various Sources

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I read this article as I wanted to understand how best to apply queer theory to the work that I wanted to do, and ended up learning a different way of thinking about and understanding queer theory itself; this article poses that queer theory shouldn’t be understood in an academic sense as it is not academic to people within the community, it is a very real and vital personal thing that impacts how we survive the world. Thinking of it as both a collaborative and personal thing helped me to understand the way in which reducing a lived experience to a theory threatens to separate one identity from another and neglect the intersections between membership of different groups and how that effects the way that we interact with the world and people around us.

Lauren Berlin, Michael Warner

What Does Queer Theory Teach Us About X?

PMLA, 1995

Vol. 110, No. 3, p. 343-349

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I read this essay to inform my work as it defines the ‘other’ and expresses why the minority needs to create third spaces for themselves that are free from the policing of the majority. I’m also interested in how it articulates the other as a space in which we have to articulate our history in a way that is palatable to the majority while also being correct, all while having our history be so unclear and censored its impossible to know the truth. We become both responsible for telling our own truths while being told what they are. The liminal third space created between intersecting identities allows us to explore our experience of the world free from otherness, so this space often becomes a space of survival and healing.

The Third Space of Enunciation: postcolonial artists and their articulation of hybrid worlds

Practice-Led Dissertation, 2019