(Image is speaker's own created in homage to Tammy Rae Carland's Lesbian Beds (2002) series
There ain't a problem I can't fix, I can do it in the mix
Following the Affective Turn
University of Brighton
17 September 2021
Abstract:
In a time of care abandon, environmental decline and viral emergency, how is queer/trans capacity
perceptible when we tune into alternative frequencies? Thinking at the intersection of Queer/Trans of
Colour Critique, remix culture and public feelings - I seek to theorise queer dance floors as gestational
spaces in which we birth ourselves and each other.
In the club - we are undone by an affective porosity, where the fugitively of queer and trans (of colour)
life, joy and desire shape our rhythms. By re-orientating discussions of ‘contagious relationality’ from
epidemic cultures to dancefloors frequencies I consider how such affective saturations may meet one
invitation of Sophie Lewis’s Full Surrogacy Now: "to bring about the conditions of possibility for opensource,
fully collaborative gestation.” (2019)
I further consider the employment of a spatial, performative and affective ‘glitch’ (Russell, 2020) follows a
history of Black, queer/trans* and disabled activist interventions of how to birth ourselves into
unaccommodating worlds. Whereby imagining radical otherwise(s) where we gift our labour to each
other as opposed to institutions, co-create the spaces to weather the ongoing disasters and mobilise a
resistance that centres pleasure and joy.
The Followning the Affective Turn conference was held at the University of Brighton.
Full program details can be found here