The Drawing
Spacetime co-ordinate: Ashland, PA, March 1991
“Performativity has been essential to queer theory. And yet, performativity has been figured (almost exclusively) as a human affair […] But human exceptionalism [is an odd scaffolding] on which to build a theory meant to account for abjection and the differential construction of the human.” (Barad 2011:122)
I was an exchange student at an American high school.
I knew I stood out. The Swede.
It didn’t bother me.
But I could hear the voices mocking me.
Eager to show how they set the norms.
“Radster!”
“Queer!”
Hostile shouts from nowhere.
An anonymous note tucked into one of my schoolbooks.
Slipped between the pages.
A drawing of me on lined notebook paper.
On my T-shirt the word Cure had been replaced with Queer.
At the time I didn’t read queer as having to do with sexual identity.
It wasn’t a word on the vocabulary lists back home.
Back then, it only rang of oddness. Of being different.
I’ve kept the drawing.
Now I look at it with a kind of warmth—
though I suspect it was meant as a jab.
A teasing sting.
The shirt and the drawing cut together and apart.
Language, objects, time, culture, politics—
entangled.
Barad writes of “differences that matter.”
Much later I came to understand
how the word queer carried another meaning.
How it has swung between slur and refuge,
both attack and a possible promise of belonging.
A Cure from being Queer?
