Finding More: Feeling, Dancing, and Being Through Intuitively Queer Knowledges

Abstract

Intuitively queer knowing can be understood as sensing or feeling that there is something more out there to know, see, and feel than may be initially apparent. Here, queer is an indicator of unstable identification, one that calls to queer subjects and supports their engagement in queer self-formations that challenge the assumed linearity of time and space. I find José Esteban Muñoz’s (1999) theory of disidentifications to be especially useful in debunking the mainstream view that identification is stable and, instead, understanding identification as always unstable and oftentimes contradictory. The first chapter of this thesis is concerned with situating my exploration of intuition as a form of knowledge in relation to Western academic norms that privilege detached, objective knowledges. In the second chapter, I articulate examples of unstable identifications––and the intuitively queer knowing that facilitates them––that is dramatized in performance work, especially in comedian Marga Gomez’s (1996) sketch, Marga Gomez is Pretty, Witty & Gay. Memory, as explored by Muñoz and Gomez, is another site of crossing, and I theorize the importance of queer memories using Jessica Benjamin’s (1990) notions of the intersubjective and intrapsychic and Andrew Barnaby’s (2013) interpretation oft he Freudian concept, belatedness. Performance work is integral to this project given that it was created in conversation with a capstone piece in dance titled, “returning, again.” The rehearsal process for “returning, again” functioned as a space of exploration and reflection for me and my cast of four dancers, allowing us to investigate our personal experiences of queer identity, glamor, and intuitively queer knowing through movement. I explore this site of knowing and making in the third chapter, but my experiences as a dancer leave traces throughout all of my writing, emphasizing dance as a vital piece of my own ongoing queer self-formation.