Queercrip Reflection on the Politics of Holding Tight vs. Being Nearby

INT. HOSPITAL—ARTIFICIAL LIGHT

A bath stands in a tiled hall, white paint peeling off the bottom. Behind an old plastic shower curtain, the CHILD squats in the tub, naked below their waist, legs wet. They shiver with fever, holding a glass container between their thighs. A YOUNG WOMAN kneels outside the bathtub, her hand rests on the child’s shoulder. The CHILD fixes their gaze on the metal ring of the drain where water, urea, uric acid, sodium, sulphate, ammonium, phosphate, creatinine, chloride, potassium, and proteins have been flushed out of many pairs of inflamed kidneys. The CHILD squeezes their eyes tight, preparing for pain (Lear and Alvetin (Khodyreva) 2024, 299).

The CHILD in the scene lives through their and my first experience of hospitalisation. The pains the CHILD prepares for are of acute and later chronic pyelonephritis, a nearly-deadly result of medical mistakes that instigated other diagnoses, led the CHILD to years in hospitals and made them viscerally aware of what living a nonapparently¹ queercrip bodymind² entails in various dominant institutional contexts. In short, living this bodymind means being tightly held in prescripted corrective care protocols that are designed to effectively return one’s bodymind to the many systems of social reproduction. This CHILD now writes this reflection and keeps noticing the world’s attachment to holding. To hold often means to grab. Let me hold you [grabs], let me fake attention to your needs in a breast-beating manner of my professional self-reflection.

As a queercrip bodymind, I crave for a rearrangement of the dominant notions of corrective and (beyond the medical-industrial complex) assumptious care without disregarding the facticity of one’s painful experiences of disability and the perpetual need to advance manifold knowledge for its mitigation. In this fragmentary reflection,³ I mobilise “queercrip” as an experiential concept to imagine a politics of care that would grow from the principles of being thoughtfully ‘nearby’ – devotedly accommodating anger, irritation, and refusal.

(Queer)crip shortens the offensive term cripple reclaimed and repoliticised by the diverse transnational community of bodyminds that do not fulfil an ableist idea of an economically efficient citizen (Kafer 2013; Chen et al. 2023; Hamraie 2023; Shildrick 2002). Crip does not stand for a synonym of disability that is redundantly too often associated with visible and formally medicalised bodily conditions (Hamraie 2023): it cares about bodyminds who live “in excess of an able-bodied/disabled binary” (Mills & Sanchez, 2023) and seeks to embrace all systemically and structurally marginalised experiences of sensorial, affective, biochemical and other materially specific disablements. I mobilise “queercrip” as a site of expanded “community affiliation and political resistance” (Mills & Sanchez, 2023) that does not limit its attention to experiences of medicalisation but figures all the dominant (infra)structures and systemically disempowered positions as potentially disabling. It is a conceptual opening rather than an enclosure: it does not generalise, institutionalise or formalise but invites its revision in every unique embodyminded case. In turn, the prefix “queer” signals the orientation of crip thinking: away from the normative (Ahmed 2006).

What sort of worlds may queercrip hold and gesture? What sort of queercrip politics of holding may one imagine?

Philosopher Vilém Flusser described a gesture as a movement of a body (with a tool) for which no satisfactory causal explanations exist. Specific polito-material and cultural conditions of its emergence thicken a bodily movement into a gesture (Flusser 2014, 2). In other words, a gesture is not reactionary but “symptomatic” of the recurring conditions in which this bodymind lives. If noticed, a gesture might be a humble invitation into a story of an affect, to a situation where a gesturing bodymind has been repeatedly moved and, importantly, recognises this experience as political. Gestures are all I am able and desire to encounter at present, specifically, those that promise an invitation to a spacetime where one’s bodymind queercrips the normative politics of holding.

The artistic gesture that profoundly yet non-invasively has been holding my sore bodymind is called vs. vs is gestured by Jessie Bullivant, an artist whose work speaks with great precision about the themes and experiences of structural normativities, their systemic imposition, and devotedly gestures towards alternative world-making practices. Lodging at Pengerkatu 7 Työhuone,⁴ vs thinks-feels about the possibilities of queer companionship and reproduction from the position of a doula and invites a visitor into the space via a prior booking.

Booking my thirty-minute visit, I momentarily time-travelled to the spacetime of the acutest physical and social inflammation that my bodymind has ever known: bookings and, earlier on, queues have been an inherent part of the medicalisation protocol that I used to follow. I know a booking as an inherent part of the MIC system where one submits themselves to be medicated but, in my case, mismediated as a pathologically inefficient bodymind in need of embrained corrective care. If refused, an allegedly agential enactment of a booking radiated punishment that might have flashed out in the form of declined social benefit or a forced hospitalisation that hardly ever cared to engage with affective, sensory, quotidian knowledge of my vulnerable bodymind. To book in the vs context promised an encounter of different nature and politics: nothing would happen if I did not show up, and nobody would threaten me into an enclosure of a hospital. I inhaled and booked with full-bodied consent, waving away the ghosts of the MIC with the upcoming visit.

Upon arrival, I am greeted by Vincent Roumagnac, a co-founder of Pengerkatu 7 Työhuone, and left to intra-act with the gallery space where vs site-specifically unfolds. vs does not ask unsolicited questions and demands no other exposure. It begins as a pre-booked situation where, contrary to the dominant world, this leaky bodymind that I live is given space and time to bodymind (verb) on my terms.⁵

I am alone in the unfurnished room and (again) behind a curtain that momentarily echoes the one in the bathtub scene or many others that equip the many MIC wards or other institutional cabinets — all faking a comfort of opacity. The vs curtain pleats and wrinkles a different affective and political space. The curtain shapeshifts into a tentative intra-connective tissue of a nascent relation with vs. Committed to their place behind the curtain, Vincent and Simo Kellokumpu, the other co-founder of the space, propose to intra-act with vs from nearby. The “nearby” becomes my precise thematic location from where to speculate the politics and fleeting protocols of being held otherwise that I speculate with vs.

The nearby effortlessly created with the artists’ presence soothes with a sense of safety. The nearby does not stand for a protocol of being at the physical space of the gallery that the artists explain away. It is a proposed corpo-affective relation with the bodyminds and materialities that co-constitute the encounter I arrived to experience. This relation might happen to be salient for some⁶ of the visitors. For me, this relation unfolds as the first materiality of the art work: I sense it both as a proximity to and a carefully crafted distance from the artists: it does not agitate or entail fixtures; it is of their committed availability without expectation. This relational spaciousness, where agencies unfold freely, is the essence of the queercrip socialities I long for.

From its threshold, vs rehearses politics of holding and subsequent relationalities and worlds that are categorically different from the normative (MIC) hold. They promise to centre vulnerabilities and uncertainties of an intra-corporeal encounter. These relationalities and worlds might appear simply happening but must be a material effect of one’s sustained effort of cultivating an awareness of how tightly all the (disabling) normative structures and protocols — of inviting, welcoming and greeting — hold and grab a newly arriving bodymind. The soothing affect that the space of vs began to disperse must flesh out an example of practising this awareness. As decolonial theorist and practitioner of her own politics of being nearby Trinh T. Minh-ha has it, “the part “that cannot be imitated, taught, or repeated is the relationship one develops with the tools that define one’s actions and oneself” (Minh-ha 1992, 90).

Grounded in the artists’ affectwork, vs contours its space away from anything that resembles a tight, immobilising and expectant hold. This contour might seem self-evident, unworthy of attention, nonapparent or even unspectacular, obscured by the habit of voyeuristic abundance in arts. For the acutely attentive bodymind that I live, this contour is subversive. I do not take it for granted. I enjoy the nearby as an affective ethico-political shelter where fantasies of queercrip companionship with which vs intrigues me might flesh out.

Eased into the relational spatiality of vs, I am introduced to the key agency of the artistic gesture: I am invited to spend time with seeds. Specifically, the room holds two seeds; both are hidden behind the grey curtain. Writing with wooden tongue depressors (another queered, repurposed medical agency!), vs spells out on the floor in front of me that

inside vincent
a sunflower
seed⁸
inside simo a
corn kernel.

Wrapped away by the protective curtain and sitting in the wet, warm dim of the artists’ stomachs, the two seeds ultimately nuance the relation and artwork I previously imagined I was becoming a part of. The relational spaciousness that I sensed unfolds anew: it is not an end result of the gesture but as a material condition that encourages me to witness and contribute to its core that manifests as the vulnerable multi-agential queer companionship with the two seeds that has begun to form before my arrival. My agency shifts in this nascent relation: it does not feel central anymore but becomes a part of a complex dance of intentions, attentions, vulnerabilities, spatialities and temporalities that I wish to hold. The laborious commitment of holding otherwise remains central to vs, but its central stage is not in the room where a visitor is welcomed. It is behind the curtain, and what vs holds is a pause for two bodies of seedy knowledge to process what they know of the world surrounding them and make their next agential move.

A seed accumulates and processes the situated knowledge about pollinators, climates, weathers, soil health, fertilisers, precipitation, levels of sonic pollution and overall dynamic ecology of mutually transformative agential relations of its plant with its many neighbours. The knowledge held by seeds pauses either to consent to germination or to temporarily refuse to contribute to the milieu by omitting the expected cycle of socio-material reproduction. A seed may fall dormant until satisfying politico-material conditions emerge in its vicinity (Masters 2019). That is, seeds are literal embodiments of a pause that is ripe with potential refusal that, in turn, disallows assumptions about one’s next needs and moves. One needs to wait. Invested in a relation that holds this pause, one cannot operate with industrially designed schedules both in agriculture and institutions of corrective care. One is to nurture seedy or queercrip time (Samuels 2017; Kafer 2021; Clements and Harris 2021).

Seedy time is never one. It is inherently in/coherent, never, postponed. It waits, turns agitated, slower, dormant, stuck, sudden, possibly irritating, likely so demanding, unscheduled, sticky, quiet and affirmative of a refusal. A seedy or queercrip refusal hardly stands for a resolute signing off: it is likely to manifest as a necessary pause, a waiting (another agential enactment!), or an instance where a right not to care is exercised (Berg 2022). A queercrip refusal is an inherent generative part of a politics of being nearby that vs rehearses. A refusal appears as an exercise of one’s difference and agency that critically respond to the politico-material circumstances of their dynamic formation and that is categorically disallowed by the policing and punishing MIC and dominant world that is always on a schedule.

A companionship emergent of seedy time and spacious relationality is not an ephemeral but a pragmatic laborious project of holding and co-creating space and time that is of one’s embodied difference that fluctuates in its needs and in its capacities to contribute to its milieu. vs is explicit that a companionship it cares for and about craves for the difference that does not embody a resource from which one mines economic surplus: sunflowers and corn have been historically growing together maintaining each other’s difference. Their being nearby is labour that has beneficial effects on their individual well-being. One might speculate they live well when they mobilise their differences in a horizontal, non-hierarchical and non-extractive manner, pragmatically committed to being nearby in ways that lead to mutual enrichment.

At three, I climbed my first coach at an examination ward. I remember sticking my gaze to someone dressed in white and wearing white latex gloves – a gynaecologist. I do not remember screaming, but I remember teeth tightly clenched, some objects – several ceramic pots with blossoming nasturtiums, some bottles with sharply fragrant liquids, and patches of sterile cloth – furiously flying away from the couch. I kicked them. I did it in silent fury because nobody explained why this person dressed in white needed to tease and twist my pelvic tissues with ice-cold metal clips and spatulas reminiscent of the vs tongue depressors. The broken objects embodied a refusal of the systemic tight grab. This CHILD was not given time to process their embodyminded knowledge; they were held as a human seedling that needed to be returned on a socially reproductive gendered schedule.

I intuitively knew not to scream. The examination ward was torturously silent: the gloved touch of the silence showed no regard for my consent (Shildrick 1997, 65, 76); nobody spoke to me for a bodymind that undergoes corrective care of the MIC never allowed their knowledge. Who knows better (in a medical ward)? The one who has the power to diagnose and is authorized to perform their knowledge as transcendental truths in comfortable absence of a need to voice their vulnerability (Shildrick 2002, 49). The institution with its focus on autonomy, efficiency and control of embodyminded difference prioritises the expert over the individual.

Even when the (MIC) silencing touch is seemingly distant, it holds us tightly to know well our affective, sensory, biochemical, neurodivergent, exhausted, burned-out, chronically and acutely sick vulnerability, to silently, matter-of-factly enfold the knowledge about us into the system of social and economic reproduction (see Champan 2023). Despite being silent, the touch hypocritically expects a full disclosure of one’s vulnerable personal experiences devised to the contextual benefit of the dominant world. It never engages with experiences carefully but strategically. On the one hand, the system of dominance needs to expose vulnerability (which it systemically causes) to maintain its symbolic order. It largely depends on redefining marginalized individuals to perpetuate the myth of the able body (Shildrick 2002, 4-6) and reinforce binary hierarchies. On the other hand, within and beyond the MIC, it needs to know vulnerabilities to keep nuancing the structures of labour extraction.

Yet silence is ambivalent. In binary terms, upon which the dominant Western world stands, silence is commonly set in opposition with agential presence; yet, this does not entail that in an alternative, queercripply imagined world, silence cannot be mobilised as a will to unsay, to be cautious, to speak to some, to be quieter with others, to remain opaque, or to pause, that is, to dwell as a powerful language of its own. (Minh-ha 1987; J. Logan Smilges 2022).

Silence is an essential materiality of being nearby, socialites and companionships this politics tickles into existence. Being nearby means to gesture availability while remaining haptically non-invasive. This manifestation of silence saliently co-constitutes the artful situation that vs staged: it is, indeed, a quiet, nearly silent gesture; it does not enact a silencing protocol but lays out a background of generous quietness as a potential for a conversation. If and when one needs it and ready to contribute. Situated silence is welcome here as a telling, agential enactment. We are behind the curtain. Let me know if you need us.

Who knows better? The one who asks and listens well.

Patterns of relations and extractive socialities of all sorts make me sore. Hence, I desire no tight hold. I am acutely craving for a politics of socialities that are devoted to being available for queer(crip) plotting, are open to receiving, generatively mobilising, and pausing this availability when one’s bodymind flags so. I desire an alternate world that faces vulnerability as, in Satu Herrala’s terms, a common denominator (Herrala 2023) that’s now hijacked by the system of dominance. I desire a world that oozes, thickens, and creeps out from the queercrip politics of being nearby.

Being nearby might appear effortless, non-spectacular, and quiet. In dailiness, it fleshes out as a nonapparent, voyeuristically undetectable choreography of multiple consensual labours and commitments sore and exhausted with recurring waves of critical awareness about the dynamic injustices of the dominant world. Being nearby is not easy. I imagine its power and radical potential accumulating exactly in its uneasy, laborious nonapparentness: its working might remain undetected for the normative structures and appear inconsequential for the gargantuan dominant world. Let’s remain strategically undetectable.

Queercriply, this politics and praxis are a critical alternative to the tight dominant hold; it is open to bodyminds disabled by various intersecting structures beyond medicalised communities. No, we are not all disabled, but all the normativities are potentially disabling (Kafer 2021, 13). That is, being nearby might become a mobilisation site that queercrip communities are rehearsing out of a vital necessity. It might become an embodied collective affinity and commitment to reimagining a politics of care (Kafer 2014, 10 - 14; 2021) that does not arrive with a pastel pink utopian ribbon. As a queercrip bodymind knows it, socialities that emerge from being nearby are likely to be untidy, might stink, come with puss, and vomit; they induce heavy affects or demand occasional numbness (as a pause).

I would like to thank Glasgow Seed Library, the Sacro Garden Project and Emily May Armstrong for creating a space for seedy learning, Holly Isard for sharp reference advice, Yvonne Billimore and Joss Allen for letting me mulch ideas in their allotment, my queercrip communities across the Northern latitudes, and finally, Jessie Bullivant for their meticulous attention to how different bodyminds might want to be held.