In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, José Esteban Muñoz evokes this “not yet” as an important political modality: “Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer.” José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (NYU Press, 2009), 1.
Organized abandonment refers to the intentional withdrawal of resources, services, and opportunities from specific people, places, and areas, especially affecting Indigenous and Black people. This disinvestment and neglect is not happenstance but carefully organized. Drawing the term originally from David Harvey’s work, Ruth Wilson Gilmore has been thinking with questions of “organized abandonment” for decades. Gillmore asks: “Forgotten places are not outside history. Rather, they are places that have experienced the abandonment characteristic of contemporary capitalist and neoliberal state reorganization. Given the enormous disorder that ‘organized abandonment’ (Harvey 1989, 303) both creates and exploits, how can people who inhabit forgotten places scale up their activism from intensely localized struggles to something less atomized and therefore possessed of a significant capacity for self-determination?” Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Forgotten Places and the Seeds of Grassroots Planning,” in Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship, 1st ed. vol. 6., ed. Charles R, Hale (Oakland: University of California Press, 2008), 31.
Hil Malatino describes waiting as a trans affect, “those long moments in-between, in waiting–suggesting that dwelling in the timespace of interregnum may be all we have, as dystopic and dysphoric as it may be.” Hil Malatino, Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022), 14.
Description of WACHT by WILD Producties, translated from Dutch by the author. “WACHT,” WILD Producties, ➝.
In her widely circulated n+1 essay, “On Liking Women,” Andrea Long Chu writes: “I have never been able to differentiate liking women from wanting to be like them.” Andrea Long Chu, “On Liking Women. The Society for Cutting Up Men is a rather fabulous name for a transsexual book club,” n+1, no 30: Motherland, Winter 2018, ➝. In the T4T special of Trans Studies Quarterly Cassius Adair and Aren Aizura explore “a masc4masc t4t erotics, not as a site of social support or solidarity but as a site of identity formation: a type of contagious gendering through which a crush on or a desire to fuck a trans person produces a recognition of the self in the other” (46). Adair and Aizura “discuss the coming into identity that, we propose, actually can happen via desire for trans people, including a sexual urge toward or attraction to people who look like the person one wants to be” (47). Cassius Adair and Aren Aizura, “‘The Transgender Craze Seducing Our {Sons}’; or, All the Trans Guys Are Just Dating Each Other,” TSQ : Transgender Studies Quarterly 9, no. 1 (2022): 44–64.
Christoph Hanssmann, Care without Pathology: How Trans- Health Activists Are Changing Medicine, 1st ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023), 236.
Director Anna Martine Whitehead created a performance, FORCE! an opera in three acts, based on the waiting room of a prison she regularly visits. In this waiting room, where loved ones are stalled until they can see their incarcerated spouse, sibling or friend, working class coalitions rise. People return to that same room, time after time, and they start to check in on one another, knowing who is looking for a job and who just had a baby. The waiting room isn’t a transparent space. It’s thick and dense, Whitehead: “We don’t learn how to see those spaces even though so much is going on.” The prison waiting room appears to be an inactive space, with nothing going on. But Whitehead understands this nothingness as an activity. Anna Martine Whitehead shared her research during a talk at the New School in New York City, titled “Still in the Waiting Room” on October 23, 2024. I was present in person for the talk, but a recording can be found on the New School website: ➝.
Here, I echo Fumi Okiji’s intimacy with the concept of “dwelling.” In Jazz as Critique, she writes: “Jazz is always poised to take leave of a situation in which its “language” cannot be heard or will not be listened to. The music retreats into ineffability, continually arriving at ‘a place named No-Such-Place.’ The music is an intramural mobile squat—here, but elsewhere, too. Dwelling in mobility. It is always of ‘imminent departure’ and ‘post-expectant’ arrival” (51). As well as: “A dwelling is a place we reside or stay. To dwell is also used to refer to when one spends some time thinking through an issue. To stay there and linger. To delay moving on. The word is a development of the Old English dwęllan, which sometimes meant to ‘tarry, linger, delay,’ but more often to ‘seduce, lead astray’ (closely related to dwolian, Old English for wander). But it is thought that our present conventional use of the word, meaning to ‘abide, stay {or} reside,’ comes from an Old Norse source. The seeming contradiction between ‘stay put’ and ‘seduce, lead astray’ or ‘wander’ is what interests me most, as it echoes a certain unsettledness chronicled in black expression and thought” (58). Fumi Okiji, Jazz as Critique: Adorno and Black Expression Revisited (Stanford University Press, 2018). Hanging out refers to Lani Hanna’s methodology of “queer hanging out.” Queer hanging out does not point to a gathering that is organized for a purpose or productive reasons. Instead, referencing Renato Rosaldo, hanging out underlines the accidental nature of research. For such accidental relationality and research to happen, spaces of gathering have to exist. For more on the infrastructure of hanging out, see Lani Hanna’s 2024 dissertation “Counter-Institutional Archives as Political Infrastructure,” for the University of California Santa Cruz Feminist Studies department.
