Contagious & Queer

Would you love trans, if trans spread around the world like wildfires today? Would you love trans, if LGBT characters in books make your kids gay? Would you love trans, if there is no cure, no protection against catching trans, no residue of assigned genders at birth, no leftovers of heterosexual familiarity? Would you transition, if trans is just a trend—our worst kept secret? Can you love trans, not as a box ticking identity, but as a contagious inevitability?

Call me high maintenance but that is the love I want. I do not want to be accepted for who I am and then get used to it (a self as it). I want to be changed by you and you by me and I want us all to have no self to name—just some spare change and messy mutual exchange. 

This year’s IDFA queer program is called  Contagious & Queer, because I’m sick of defending queer and trans life.* In progressive circles, our existence is often excused as a normal natural variation. To be clear: My problem is not with our existence, but with the idea that proof itself is needed. Ultimately, and idealistically, I’m interested in the possibility of writing and speaking and trans living without defense. Why defend our experience, identity, projected otherness, and prove the use of its existence in relation to the norm? I want an understanding of importance and value without defense. 

Living in the U.S., I feel a growing desire to find a different response to the Don’t Say Gay laws. I do not want to qualm anyone’s worries by proving that queers are born a biological minority (#BornThisWay). Who says the right wing and moderate majority deserve such pacifying? Instead, I argue saying gay indeed makes you desire gay. I study the power of language and the language of power; the way words attach to bodies and vice versa. Hearing something, makes it present. Saying something, makes it possibly true. Repeating something, makes it recognizable. The more recognizable a word, name, history, concept is, the truer it appears. The Don’t Say Gay laws are not extraordinary or even outrageous: they just show an extremely homophobic understanding of the power of language. At worst, the Don’t Say Gay Laws make queer life impossible. At medium, the Don’t Say Gay Laws scares queers. At best, the Don’t Say Gay laws are a perfect recognition of queerness’s dangerous appeal.

As a public program, Contagious & Queer is not going to shy away from saying gay. But saying gay out loud and clear with the premise of contagion is not the same as coming out for self-actualization. It is not the individual that is set free when queer is understood as contagious, it is queerness let loose. 

In Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, a novel by Torrey Peters (famous for her bestseller Detransition, Baby), an angry trans girl develops a bacterial infection that blocks the body’s natural production of all sex hormones. The molecular biology student did this because: “I was thinking that I want to live in a world where everyone has to choose their gender.” Patient zero is this 2016 novel’s protagonist. She gets infected because another angry trans girl injects her, vengeful because their t4t fling has gone sour. From infection on, she is contagious. Instructed to quarantine for a week, she speed walks home. In the park near her apartment, she gets cornered by a group of men. This is a repetitive scene, a known situation. Exhaustion leads her to do the only logical thing: she coughs in her perpetrator’s face.

Contagion happens in many ways. Trans does not start with some hormonal level, a favorite color, a choice of toys, or a brain explained. It starts in community with others. It means avoiding an aggressive cough in the face by choosing to kiss instead. It can start with someone who we desire to fuck, or desire to be, or desire to be and fuck simultaneously. It can start with the desire to desire. It can begin in reaction to patriarchal violence, it can grow in response to sexual assault. It can flourish because of boredom, to bury normativity, or from a slutty desire for better orgasms. It can be the word. It can come from saying gay. As Cameron Awkward-Rich writes in The Terrible We. Thinking With Trans Maladjustment: “How does one become trans? Often the answer is: by reading.”

Trans might show up in isolation. In such a case, trans appears to be a biological phenomenon, free of socialization and contagion. But such an essentialist belief ignores the fact that isolation can only be understood as isolation in relation to understanding social conceptions of loneliness and exclusion. Being isolated is itself an anti-queer form of living and thus already lives in reaction to queerness. The nuclear family fights with queerness, even or especially when queerness is muted and anxiously absent. It is through exposure to transness that trans can develop. Exposure also lives in our disappearance, our forgottenness, our unwantedness. Exposure does not just refer to the visible and concrete presence of trans and queer people. Queerness doesn’t stick to people. It is more viral than personal: it travels through language, gesture, imagery, air, traditions, movement, objects.

The films screened at IDFA’s Contagious & Queer are not secretly conveying gayness or explicitly spreading trans. My belief in contagion is so much greater than making trans a missionary tale. Contagious & Queer adopts a more structural point of view: Everything that can be witnessed, tasted, sensed, viewed already is legible through some level of contagion. Without contagion, meaning is impossible. Contagious qualities are not rare. But queer is especially contagious, because the spread of trans is continuously and ever-increasingly feared. Because we are feared to leak and spread, our contagion is extra luring and effective. Those who are barred from trans by parents, states, institutions, borders, liberal tolerance, and capitalist acceptance, learn to spot queer in the slightest glimpse and slippage.

This is why I propose a trans viewing practice. In a film festival, this could go like this: Whenever you see something queer, you yell out “trans!”. A good queer viewer will not wait for something obvious on screen. Instead, the trans viewing practice is best employed in response to everything that is not yet queer and trans. The sky’s color blue and the setting pink sun, the wonky table in the room? Trans. Super trans! Reveal the reveal of disclosure and the push for visibility by overdoing it. Affirm the stereotypes that you are initially inclined to defend yourself against, by producing a contagious viewing and seeing trans everywhere: eh-veh-ry-whe-re. The trans viewing practice is initiated by faking it. Project the stereotypes you are told to be so incredibly present that the possibility of original image disappears. Show that there wasn’t an original visual or real meaning in the first place. This trans viewing practice teaches the lack of foundation not by denial or erasure, but by exaggeration. Make everything ooze you. Individualization is refused by overcommitting to stereotypes otherwise projected onto you.

I’m looking forward to welcoming everyone at Contagious & Queer, on Sunday, November 12, and in the afternoon workshop sessions between November 13-17 in the Contagion Practice Room in IDFA Vondelpark Pavilion. However, queer contagion spreads fastest when its presence is least expected. To engage in a trans viewing practice, I recommend: Go to films that are not marked as queer and trans and gay, go to those films that appear to not even remotely engage with queer and trans and fill the room by seeing it everywhere. Queerness cannot be quarantined: may it spread dangerously.

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queer and trans life * While in an academic, every day and alphabet (LGBTQIA+) context it is common to differentiate trans and queer and gay, I’m here using these terms interchangeably. This is not meant to reduce the experience of trans, queer and gay or conflate the differentiations. I choose to do this as an aesthetic intervention, meant to push for the inter-contagiousness of these experiences.

If trans and queer and gay are contagious, they cannot exist as safeguarded categories. Within LGBTQIA discourse, the differences between Q and G and T might not always be clearly mapped, but their distinction is generally accepted and assumed. Without desiring to conflate axes of difference, I choose this aesthetic interchangeability as a way to push against the increase of taxonomic thinking. Kadji Amin’s talk and article We Are All Non-Binary: A Brief History of Accidents points to the coloniality of pretending that it is possible to correctly name and mark identities, as if the identities themselves can be excavated as inherent truths. This negates the relational existence of language, desire, identity.

This article was published in IDFA 2023 Notes on a festival.