Comments on: Episode 91: Gregg Bordowitz and David Getsy on “queer”

By: Open Practice Committee » Blog » Our Literal Speed 2009

Open Practice Committee » Blog » Our Literal Speed 2009 — Thu, 14 May 2009 16:48:55 +0000

[...] http://badatsports.com/2007/episode-91-gregg-bordowitz-and-david-getsy-on-%E2%80%9Cqueer%E2%80%9D/ [...]

By: Queer Thing, Painting « HoertAuf

Queer Thing, Painting « HoertAuf — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 11:12:27 +0000

[...] Interview mit Gregg Bordowitz unter anderem über Amy Sillmans Bilder gibt es bei Bad at Sports. Das Buch namens „Queer Thing, Painting“ (1938) von Walter Pach gibt es bei Archive.org zum [...]

By: Verssmesymn

Verssmesymn — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 11:48:28 +0000

I’d prefer reading in my native language, because my knowledge of your languange is no so well. But it was interesting! Look for some my links:

By: Brian

Brian — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 18:21:09 +0000

Justin-

You may want to check out the Center for Tactical Magic. We’ll be interviewing them this summer.

Brian

By: Justin Polera

Justin Polera — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 20:46:57 +0000

Elijah,

Are you in contact with any of the dark “underground lineage of queer magick” you posted about? I would really like to include the work of at least one of those artists in the Show I am curating in September. Please e-mail me if you have more information:
Justin.Polera@gmail.com

And thank you again for sharing your insight.

By: elijah

elijah — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 20:42:18 +0000

In total agreement about “Hogg.” Its my litmus test/trial-by-fire with new friends – I lend it to them (inflict it on them?) to see what happens …

By: Boots

Boots — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 20:39:31 +0000

“Schräg” What a great word. Sometimes new words (to me) function better than old because they lack the burden of connotation.

I want to add a few more authors I admire to Elija’s list. Not all men-who-fuck men, but all are transgressive and all are queer by my standards: Georges Bataille, Heather Lewis, Gary Indiana, and without the guidance of Hubert Selby, Jr. I never would have understood Trade. I like books that hurt me physically. When I first got Delany’s “Hogg,” I started reading it while riding the Red Line home. Talk about that dirty touch feeling. Just READING the book made me feel as if I was the one doing the dirty touching. Delany is my literary daddy.

By: Mark Staff Brandl

Mark Staff Brandl — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 20:12:16 +0000

I just listened to the whole thing straight through — entrancing! That’s some good theor-o-rizin’! With Breadth, erudite, yet with exact concrete details on application.

I had never read much Queer theory, mostly assuming it was rather more Gay rights issues — with which I have no problems, am rather in agreement, but just wasn’t a large interest of mine — i suppose because I’m straight. This was a lesson to me.

They canvassed a truly startlingly original new possible theoretical re-imagining of a position for the individual in a poststructural anti-individual world. Philosophically hopeful and impressive.

There is a word in German that the participants might find interesting — it is “schräg” and means something like the original meaning of “queer”, that is, quirky, at a slant to the “normal” etc., but it carries no negative nor “other sexual” overtones. I thought of it as they discussed “queer moments” and the like, including bikers and other outsiders. These ideas, similar to feminist gendering, could be a great springborad for a humanizing of even mainstream cultural theory. (And I didn’t mean humanist nor re-humanizing, but a beginning of an actual humanized individualism, shorn of the “universal” normative stuff). Keep it up. You guys just might even “liberate” us straight folks too (probably against the wishes of many)!

By: elijah

elijah — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 19:52:31 +0000

I don’t think Genet or Burroughs embraced victimization so much as they aggressively inverted moral norms in order to invent alternate realities. Genet treated thieves as kings and betrayal as the utmost virtue in his novels, for instance. What I appreciate about them now is that they used their sexuality as a springboard, not so much for radical politics, always – although Genet certainly did at some points – but for social and political mischief. Rather than ignoring decades of progress, I think they are excellent models for Right Now because we are currently in such a state of political mortification – the war in Iraq, impending environmental disaster, etc. Whatever energies that we have in us from which to mobilize dissent and imagination, let’s use them!

Also, Genet and Burroughs may be models from the past, but their work has been carried on, worked on, and elaborated by certain queer folks. In the spirit of Bad at Sports, I am gonna drop the names of some darksided men-who-fuck-men: Coil (now sadly defunct, but continuing in part as the Threshold House Boys Choir), Dennis Cooper, Bruce LaBruce, Samuel Delany, Scott Treleaven, Black Sun Productions/Massimo & Pierce, Hakim Bey. I like to think of it as an underground lineage of queer magick, stretching from Rimbaud to Wojnarowicz to …

By: Boots

Boots — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 15:02:56 +0000

The “seedy,” the “criminal” are at the heart of queer identity. This is what sets it apart from the binary of homosexuality or gay or lesbian. The definition of queer is formed on the idea outsiderness. So much ‘progress’ is assimilation. Queer might desire equality, but not equivalence.

And Burroughs. His definition of ‘queer,’ as defined in his novel “Queer” is formed in opposition to heterosexuality, but also in direct opposition to homosexuality–whole book is filled with references to faggots and marys. He equates queerness with being disembodied, with being in a constant state of other. He wrote that in 1949. Fuck, I love Burroughs.