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While there has no doubt been a commodification of gay identity on reality television, examples of resistance are increasingly in evidence. These instances of progressive performativity have become possible through heterosexual/homosexual alliances formed within the structure of the programming. While Jon Murrays standing as an openly gay man influenced the inclusion of gay participants in The Real World, this type of early alliance (a gay producer aligning himself with gay performers) has been displaced by alliances within the text. Consequently, Richard Hatch's success may be deemed to have been possible though his alliance with nongay performers, and James Getzlaff so success may have been possible through his close friendship with heterosexual female Andra and their impromptu alliance to ostracize the presumptuous intruder. No doubt Boy Meets Boy is a landmark work. It co-opted successful representational paradigms of gay male identity and homosexual romance from the groundbreaking reality shows The Real Worldand Sur-vivor. Boy Meets Bay attempted to undermine behavioral stereotypes by placing a gay man in competition with heterosexual males. Although James Getzlaff may have little in common with Richard Hatch, both represent emerging gay power bases within reality texts - representations that counter subjugation. The future of gay performance in reality television is currently under review. The outstanding success of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy suggests that alliances between gay and straight performers will become more central. Queer Eye includes a cast of gay men who involve themselves with a heterosexual male in order to improve his social/romantic pros-pects. While the show is (currently) growing in success (with the format sold to 20 counties worldwide (TV Barn), this type of alliance is inherently unbalanced and is a regressive depiction of gay identity.

People with pieced together expectations also had nuanced outlooks regarding straight allies’ knowledge of the queer community and its issues. For instance, respondents with political expectations required that allies stay abreast of knowledge pertaining to definitions of sexual identities and terms like deadnaming or misgendering. By contrast, respondents with post-gay expectations had no such requirements. Participants who pieced together their expectations for allies expressed that they could not place too much expectation in allies being aware of queer issues without being educated by a queer person first. This is probably because these participants did not minimize their queerness like the exclusively white and male group respondents with postgay expectations, but they also did not emphasize the political aspects of queer identity like the majority black and trans respondents with political expectations. Sadie’s statement was typical of those with pieced together expectations: If someone says they’re an ally and they’re generally there, I assume that they’re someone who would learn more if it was told to them . . . Maybe they just don’t know the appropriate responses. But in general, I assume that they care about my wellbeing. Forbes and Ueno 171 Because these respondents expected allies to acknowledge and support queerness but simultaneously did not hold them accountable for learning such material on their own, they highlighted an importance of straight people’s willingness and intention, and not necessarily their specific actions. These respondents expected action from allies but did not expect such action to be political in nature. As Austin put it, I think that the difference between being a good ally and a bad ally is that good allies stand up for anyone anytime they see harassment, anytime they see someone who may feel uncomfortable. I think it’s their job to use their privilege to stand up for queer people who may be struggling. Similar to those with political expectations, Austin expressed that allies should give attention to queer-specific issues and use their straight privileges to help queer people. At the same time, she resembled those with post-gay allyship expectations by calling for allies to be supportive at the interactional level, stepping in only when “they see harassment” or “see someone who may feel uncomfortable.”

We take up Meyer’s (2012) call that topics primarily focused on queerphobia should use an intersectional lens. Queer people with multiple “othered” (Fine 1994) identities, such as the poor and queer people of color, may conceptualize their queer identities differently from others who are more privileged, such as the white and affluent. All queer people must navigate internalized homophobia (Meyer and Dean 1998), resultant from a largely heterosexist U.S. culture, in constructing their queer identities and self-concepts. However, those who possess other disadvantaged identities have to consider their queerness within the context of a matrix of domination (Collins 2000) and combat the entire system of disadvantage and not just one spoke in the wheel (Meyer 2012). For example, queer immigrant youth engage in activism work that is centered on sexuality, ethnicity, and undocumented status (Terriquez 2015), whereas queer white people often do not realize the oppression they experience has racialized implications (Meyer 2012). This is all to say that using an intersectional lens is key to examining how a constellation of social identities contributes to why queerness becomes more important to the self-concept for some people, whereas for others, it is less so. Extending this literature, we argue that intersectionality creates variation in queer people’s expectations for allies by introducing differences in how queer people believe allies can help achieve desired movement outcomes. In the case of queer college students, we find that their expectations for straight allies depend on how they conceptualize their queerness. Ghaziani (2011) suggested such a possibility as two competing frameworks present in the queer population. The “us versus them” framework was the dominant framework in the past, he argued, and it was based on an oppositional stance that highlighted differences between queer people and their straight counterparts, thus echoing the political discourse mentioned above. Many queer people today adopt the “us and them” framework as they endorse queer people’s assimilation into the mainstream culture. The “us and them” framework sees queer people emphasize their similarities with straight people, resonating with the post-gay discourse. However, the “us versus them” framework has not disappeared, and it is still employed by some young queer people, especially those who are marginalized not only because of their queerness but also for other oppressed characteristics (Terriquez 2015). Thus, the two frameworks relate straight people to the queer community in different ways. In the present study, we take a step further to demonstrate that queer people vary among themselves in what expectations they have for straight allies. In sum, the existing literature highlights the importance of allies’ roles in social movements (Ghaziani 2011; McCarthy and Zald 1977; Russo 2014), but little is known about what expectations minority group members have for allies. The focus on allies themselves across movements in extant literature presumes that they are useful for movement success, and seminal movements work on resource mobilization has suggested that allies are a factor in determining movement outcomes (McCarthy and Zald 1977). While the question of why allies are important to social movements is outside of the scope of the present study, we posit that a failure to investigate the expectations set by groups allies seek to support absents important information about how allies and their efforts are perceived to be valuable to movement beneficiaries. Building on works that focus on other identity-based movements, we use the case of divergent LGBTQ+ rights movements to investigate queer people’s expectations for allies and their perceived role in movement outcomes. We ask the following questions: What do queer people, as a diverse group, expect of straight allies? How do students’ queer and other intersecting identities influence their expectations and evaluations of straight allies? By focusing on the marginalized queer account and its variation, this paper offers a novel perspective on allyship, which addresses how varied expectations complicate the function of allyship in movements. Ultimately, we find that gender and racial identities of queer people influence which sexuality discourses they draw on to formulate their expectations of allies. Their varied expectations posit different roles allies should take in LGBTQ+ rights movements.

Allies are often presumed to be beneficial for movements. For example, movement scholars have argued that allies help marginalized groups access resources and appeal to mainstream audiences (McCarthy and Zald 1977; Russo 2014). Yet, most work on straight allies focuses on how straight people come into the ally role and how being an ally benefits them, so little is known about whether and how straight allies benefit LGBTQ+ rights movements. Furthermore, little is known about what queer people expect from straight allies, making it difficult to investigate allies’ effectiveness up against expectations. However, research on the expectations and roles of allies in both women’s and people of color’s rights movements reveals patterns that one might expect to find in the present case. Prior work suggests that marginalized actors hold similar expectations of allies across identity-based movements. For example, a study of white allies found that people of color held two primary expectations of their allies: informed action and affirmation of racialized identities (Brown and Ostrove 2013). Affirming attitudes toward marginalized identities have been linked with low prejudice, an awareness of privilege, and an affinity for those unlike oneself (Ostrove and Brown 2018). In addition, Messner, Greenberg, and Peretz (2015) wrote about an example of informed action as male feminists, taking cues from women, began to hold other men accountable for helping end sexual and domestic violence against women. It follows that, based on what is known from these other contexts, some queer people might expect their allies to be actively involved in helping disrupt and dismantle homophobic and queerphobic systems of oppression while also affirming their existence as queer people.

A captivating TV series can make you feel many emotions — anger, sadness, grief, and laugh-out-loud joy. That’s Pose. Each episode begins with the infamous provenance “the category is–”. Following these words, the lights hone in on the current ballroom act, who’s always strutting in glorious attire. It’s upbeat at first, but surviving the AIDS epidemic remains present in the backdrop of the protagonist’s lives. So, it’s the throughline of honest and authentic stories rooted in history that truly takes the center stage. Pose not only tells queer history during an incredibly challenging period in modern times, but it tells queer history from a Black and Brown perspective. In other media, much of queer history, if taught at all, is often sanitized and whitewashed. But these stories are essential to grasping modern LGBTQ movements and where we’ve come to today. Millennials such as myself weren’t alive to eyewitness the AIDS epidemic, and we may never fully understand the struggles of our ancestors. Many of us rely on media to get a glimpse of what life was like in places hit hard by HIV and AIDS, like New York City. Which makes media like Pose, accurate in their depictions of life during the epidemic, all the more compelling and meaningful. We’re lucky that the advent of the personal camcorder made For instance, you can compare in Season 2’s premiere with actual protest images. . On , more than 4,500 individuals held a “die-in” at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, interrupting John O’Connor’s Sunday mass service, in one of the largest demonstrations against the Roman Catholic Church. Why? The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York’s Cardinal John O’Connor took a stance against condom distribution and AIDS education. ACT UP, or the , initiated planning of a massive protest at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Later, (WHAM!), joined the coalition, because they also were opposed to the Church’s stance on . “In the ’80s, the Church had projected so much morality onto a virus,” Pose writer Our Lady J . “I think some of that was based in prevention because it was sexually transmitted disease for the most part…. But also people used it to discriminate against people and to further deepen the racism, transphobia, and homophobia that had already been so ingrained into American culture.” By 1990, , mostly from gay men ages 25-44, with the highest death rates among Black and Hispanic men. Unfortunately, public attention hadn’t matched the suffering that had already been felt. motto was “Silence = Death,” and they employed aggressive strategies to be heard. In Season 3’s finale, protestors led by actor Billy Porter reenacted how ACT UP invited people to scatter the ashes of their deceased loved ones. In reality, ACT UP held two in October 1992 and October 1996. Pose captured the reality of death, which loomed over many of the character’s lives as it did for so many in the queer community during the height of the AIDS epidemic. I learned something new when I saw in Season 3’s finale during one of the demonstrations a sign that said . The series also introduced us to New York Mortuary Service, and a real-life funeral director who was as being an “unsung hero” for handling AIDS cases when other funeral directors refused. Even if a funeral director who wasn’t afraid of helping a client who died from AIDS could be secured, many other opportunities for missteps in the homegoing process remained. The wording of the obituary, a seating plan, access to health records and private information, and the dispositions of assets were among the potential challenges. Sometimes one’s chosen, queer community may be meeting their loved one’s blood family for the first time as we saw in Season 2, Episode 4. The series certainly doesn’t pussyfoot around the gravity of the topic. Season 2’s premiere immediately propels us into the tragedy by placing viewers in a mass grave. That’s New York’s remote , which is where so many were laid to rest. Early on, the medical community (and by default, the public) hadn’t fully agreed on how the virus was spread, and it was believed that a separate burial place was needed for those who had succumbed to the virus. It was only in 2019 that the New York City Council passed legislation to create a public park on the island, making it more accessible to everyone, particularly the families of those buried there. Perhaps it’s the actor’s first-hand experiences which also makes Pose so incredible. Billy Porter, who , once said, “I feel like our writers understand how important their position is, as artists, as creators, and as people who get to tell stories. In this medium, you have a responsibility to entertain and to educate.” Not only is the series [is] educational, but producer Ryan Murphy is taking his participation a step further and has pledged his profits from Pose to organizations that directly serve trans and gender non-conforming people (including the , , , and the ). This acknowledges that while we have come a long way, still HIV/AIDS remains a challenge for our most marginalized and minority communities. Our queer history is rich, and Pose reminds us of where we came from, and also challenges us to continue building a more just society.

Each competition in “Pose,” the boisterous, resplendent drama of the 1980s ball scene on FX, begins with a ritual phrase from Pray Tell (Billy Porter), the M.C.: “The category is …” That category — the theme to which teams dress, strut and, yes, pose — might be royalty, or the military or “Dynasty.” The categories are both a competitive challenge and a way of claiming social spaces from which the catwalking combatants, gay and transgender, black and Hispanic, have been excluded. “Pose,” which begins Sunday, is itself a space-claiming project. Viewers today might recognize the “category is” phrase from “RuPaul’s Drag Race” or , if not its provenance. But “Pose” puts its characters, subculture and history stage center. It stands, bold and plumed, and demands attention. Ryan Murphy (the co-creator, with Brad Falchuk and Steven Canals), in his last FX series before , was also assiduous about hiring transgender actors and creative staff, including the author Janet Mock and Our Lady J (“Transparent”) as producers and writers. “Pose” wears its purpose confidently but lightly. Yes, it’s a story of struggle — the AIDS crisis is a constant shadow — but it spotlights its characters’ aspirations. It’s sincere, buoyant and fun, stunningly designed, mindful that a show about balls should be capable of having one. At its heart is an underdog story. Blanca (Mj Rodriguez) breaks away from the imperious ball legend Elektra (Dominique Jackson), mother of the House of Abundance, to form her own house, which she christens the House of Evangelista. (“Game of Thrones” has nothing on the regal nomenclature here.) A “house” is both a team and, literally, a home, and Blanca assembles a crew of misfits and castoffs in her apartment. She forms an especially maternal bond with Damon (Ryan Jamaal Swain), a gay teenager and aspiring classical dancer from Pennsylvania who was kicked out of his home. The pilot, kinetically directed by Mr. Murphy, introduces a world — familiar from the 1990 documentary “Paris Is Burning” but never detailed like this in series TV — without feeling mechanical or overexpository. The vogue battles, choreographed by Leiomy Maldonado and Danielle Polanco, are thrilling, art-as-combat duels. Mr. Porter (“Kinky Boots”) makes Pray Tell a wry guide to both the balls and the larger community around them. The series feels, like on Broadway or even (from a different ’80s subculture) like an attempt to better understand the present by re-examining the 1980s as an origin story. At its periphery is a more familiar, heavy-handed story of greed-is-good-era New York City, with a ubiquitous 2018 hook. Stan (Evan Peters), a social-climbing young businessman from New Jersey, lands a job with, yep, the Trump Organization. The company’s celebrity leader is spoken of but not seen. Stan’s boss, Matt (James Van Der Beek), personifies the age’s conspicuous consumption and velociraptor aggression. Mr. Van Der Beek has a gift for playing this kind of cocky boor, but when the show introduces him saying, “God Bless Ronald Reagan” while hoovering lines of coke, it manages to be both on and up the nose. The two worlds connect when Stan falls for Angel (Indya Moore), a prostitute and house member. (The series’ casting in general is a coup; Ms. Moore, a model, is a relative newcomer to acting but you wouldn’t know it from her presence and shaded performance.) They begin a long-term affair even as he and his wife, Patty (Kate Mara), build an overspent life in the suburbs; his life, too, is about the cultivation of appearances. “Realness” is a recurring theme in “Pose,” which is nuanced about the conscious and unconscious assumptions the term can involve. Elektra uses authenticity as a cudgel with Blanca, whom she insults for not “passing” well enough; a gay-bar manager ejects Blanca, saying, “I’m not throwing a costume party.” A later episode deals with the pressure to get often-dangerous augmentations and injections. But “Pose” is broadly empathetic and nonjudgmental. Each character is making complicated decisions about how to define her- or himself, including Elektra, who presents herself as unbreakable but is wrestling with getting gender-confirmation surgery that her lover (Chris Meloni) is vehemently against.

It feels redundant to explain the premise of the show in a world where JetBlue sponsorship logos plaster the façade of the Stonewall Inn. The jargon of academic queer theory is now second language in Mastercard and Gilette commercials. However, Pose remains extremely compelling and necessary. There’s educational utility in the way it employs the cinematic language of fairy tale, Twin Peaks-level melodrama and brash late-night realism for the masses. It excels in its unique hybridization of magical realism, partly inspired by Tony Kushner’s iconic play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes (1991–93), and the real events captured in Jennie Livingston’s 1990 documentary Paris Is Burning. History repeats itself if you forget it; such is the purpose of a period piece like Pose. The storyline of Season 1 unfolded parallel to the first rise of Donald Trump: it featured Evan Peters as Stan Bowes, a Trump Organization employee, and chronicled the predatory reign of Wall Street and real-estate titans over 1980s New York City, with minorities and the LGBTQ+ community suffering while white men profited in gilded board rooms. Season 2 delves deeper into the effects of AIDS and gentrification, and the myriad ways our economic and political system is designed to erase queer nonwhite people. Blanca (MJ Rodriguez) and Pray Tell are paranoid that the antiretroviral drug AZT might be a government plot to poison them. One of them does well taking the notoriously toxic medicine, while the other’s health declines even more rapidly. Elektra Abundance (Dominique Jackson), the imperious mother of Season 1, develops a lucrative career as a dominatrix for rich Wall Street johns. Unfortunately, one of her clients dies during a session; afraid that, as a trans woman, she will never get a fair hearing in court – and will be locked up in a male prison and then forced into prostitution by fellow inmates – Elektra cites the star of Paris Is Burning, legendary trans drag performer Dorian Corey, as she mummifies her client and stuffs him in her closet. It’s a moving moment delivered as a high camp classic. There’s a self-aware predictability to the show’s plot and characters, drawn readily from television tropes, despite the fact that these are characters we’ve never actually seen on television before. As a standard-issue soap-opera performed by a mostly trans and queer cast, it affirms the identity and humanity of people who have historically been erased from our cultural narratives. I’ll admit that I’m jaded and no longer interested in seeing Hollywood or the art world satisfy puny quotas for gay, black, handicapped, mentally ill and PrEP-taking perspectives in group shows and institutional programmes; but seeing Damon and Ricky’s relationship unfold on primetime was healing for me. It's proof that representation really matters. Most of the characters on Pose have been exiled from their homes for being trans or queer. Their need to express themselves is denied by default. It’s a bittersweet truth that minority groups, refused access to an endless cycle of white institutions, have turned to new forms of expression and established their own spaces, which have contributed indelibly to the canon. Queer artists of colour formed the ballroom scene as a space to develop and interrogate their own forms of modernist expression, not unlike the Studio Museum in Harlem and El Museo Del Barrio. In Pose, balls are a safe space and a laboratory that incubates ACT-UP protests and educates homeless youth on AIDS and other aspects of survival. It is a home for a group of people who otherwise wouldn’t have one. If Donald Trump was the foil for Season 1, Madonna and her hit single ‘Vogue’ (1990) soar over Season 2. By co-opting the ballroom scene (not unlike Ryan Murphy), Madonna offers hope for most of the characters on the show that the rest of the world might admire their talents. Blanca opens a nail salon called ‘Vogue Nails’, her community now suddenly on-trend. Damon and Ricky prepare to audition for Madonna’s ‘Blond Ambition Tour’. The Queen of Pop is a meta-conceptual reference throughout the season that demonstrates how media representation can offer those who feel invisible the knowledge that they matter.

Let me close by discussing my work with the Ballroom community which is a Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ cultural formation, which creates, promotes, and affirms forms of gender and sexuality, family, and community for its queer members that go unrecognized and are under attack by the law, no doubt. This community also collaborates with community-based organizations to provide support and care for people who are experiencing homelessness, food insecurity, depression and other forms of marginalization and dispossession. The increased popularity of Ballroom culture offers needed exposure and professional opportunities for LGBT people of color, particularly Black queer people. However, there is a downside to Ballroom’s expansion throughout the globe. The culture has become vulnerable to appropriation. The Black and Latinx communities who created this cultural phenomenon have not gained the recognition they deserve. As white LGBT and heterosexual communities engage and appropriate Ballroom cultural practices throughout the globe, the racism/white supremacy, homophobia, and transphobia that Black and Latinx LGBT communities face, daily, get lost. Yet these experiences are very much part of the Ballroom story. I suggest that we draw from and work with Ballroom communities, recognizing and acknowledging the context out of which the culture emerged sixty years ago and collaborate with the community through not only research, but conceptualizing, modeling, and reimagining Care for LGBTQ communities of color. While I have confidence in community recognition over State recognition, over the constitution and the legal systems in the U.S., I believe that we need to take heed to the critical issues that Professor Spindelman raises about the consequences for communities and movements concerned about race, gender, and sexual equity, anti-racism and anti-homophobia, and the protection of reproductive rights and autonomy. We need to forge communities through coalition, and we also need to lean into the realm of cultural politics because that is where the law is and has always been about a political struggle over personhood.

The central argument in Bailey’s book surrounds the performance of racialized gender, sex, and sexuality. Ballroom culture, we learn, has six gender categories, and circulating around each category is a set of discourses and practices concerning issues of sexuality and social power. As the title of the book suggests, Bailey deeply interrogates one of the categories in the ballroom gender system, the butch queen. It is in this early discussion of the gender system where Bailey introduces the key concepts that undergird much of the ethnographic engagement in the rest of the text, including performance and the concept of “realness.” Bailey argues that the individual and communal performances of sex, gender, and sexuality are a form of “work” that ballroom members do in an “attempt to refract the violence to which Black and sexual minorities are subjected to in Detroit” (32). Interestingly enough, the form that this refraction takes is in the collective and individual attempt to achieve “realness.” Realness refers to one’s successful “minimiz[ation] or elimina[tion] of any sign of deviation from gender and sexuality norms in dominant heteronormative society” in the performances of sex, gender, and sexuality (58). Realness animates many of the performances in the event through which ballroom is best known to outsiders — the ball. Balls are the spaces where performances are read—where one’s realness is determined, judged, and proven in a competition that pits house against house. So when one performs in the Femme Queen category, for example, dancers must work to achieve the best embodiment of femininity, one that most closely matches the ways that femininity has been defined by heteronormative society. Dancers must demonstrate their ability to blend in within normative spaces. According to Bailey, realness is not simply a way of miming heteronormative society, but a “creative response” to the dangers associated with not blending in, and realness functions as both an “analytic and a guide for understanding the strategic gender performances that members deploy in the urban spaces in which they live and move daily” (65). If these Black non-gender-conforming sexual minorities must move through life performing normative gender and sexualities in order to garner for themselves what should be the right of everyone — a basic level of freedom from violence and discrimination — then balls offer the space for being recognized and rewarded for those performances, something that is not guaranteed in normative society. Ball events offer an opportunity to exercise “greater agency in shaping how they are viewed by altering and performing their bodies in ways that disguise their gender and sexual nonconformity” (65). However, since ballroom community members rely on normative ideas of femininity and masculinity, they demarcate the boundaries of normative categories and thus reinscribe the very boundaries that mark their bodies as “out of place” and inauthentic in normative society. Yet, it is in these distinctive Black queer spaces that one can demonstrate their ability to question, revise, and expertly perform various categories of racialized gender, sex, and sexuality— and, thus, demonstrate their realness (32, 58). Realness is how participants can prove that they do indeed have what it takes to “fit” into the “real world,” even as the real world castigates and ostracizes Black sexual and gender dissidents.

This chapter discusses the way ballroom culture is represented in the first season of the series paying especial attention to its two main constituent parts as sites of not only protection and shelter, but also self-assertion and empowerment for a variety of vulnerable subaltern identities who have been deprived of a livable life in both homo and heteronormative communities. It starts with an analysis of the situational vulnerability and the precariousness an important part of the Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ populational segment in the U.S. lives in and then offers an insight of the way houses and balls operate as strategies of survival and resistance for gays and trans women who have gone through experiences of discrimination and stigmatisation in society at large and in their own ethnic communities. The ballroom offers them a possibility of expressing their own subjectivities in terms of ethnicity, sex, gender and sexuality and, at the same time, prepares them for resisting the physical and psychological attacks they persistently suffer from heteronormativity. The last part of this chapter focusses on the transitional and interstitial nature of the ballroom, a social space which, in reproducing the neoliberal fantasy of getting success and wealth, simultaneously questions the real nature of such a goal presenting it as just a performative repetition of an unreachable phantasmagorical ideal. Though vulnerability can be understood as an ontological condition (Butler 2004, 2016; Mackenzie et al. 2014), it does not affect all human beings in the same way. Mackenzie, Rogers and Dodds take into account “situational” sources of vulnerability that are “context-specific” and “may be caused or exacerbated by the personal, social, political, economic or environmental situations of individuals or social groups” (2014, 7). Humanity as a whole is ontologically vulnerable, but certain social groups and individuals are much more exposed to particular sources of vulnerability than others due to the precarious condition of their own lives: “there are ways of distributing vulnerability, differential forms of allocation that make some populations more subject to arbitrary violence than others” (Butler 2004, xii). The Black and Latinx members of the ballroom scene who “come from families, communities, and neighborhoods in which they have had to navigate the often difficult terrain of the streets, which means facing homophobic and transphobic violence and abuse, homelessness and hunger, insufficient education, under- and unemployment, and general sociocultural dispossession” (Bailey 2013, 7) deeply suffer from this situational vulnerability. Their circumstances make them suitable to be considered as part of the “precariat”, a new “class-in-the-making [text italics]” (Standing 2011, 7) that, in a globalised neoliberal world, comprises a vast amount of quite heterogeneous people whose only point in common is the systemic obstacles they find when trying to get a certain economic and social stability: “to be precaritased is to be subject to pressures and experiences that lead to a precariat existence, of living in the present, without a secure identity or sense of development achieved through work and lifestyle” (Standing 2011, 16). The precarious living conditions of this populational segment have important physical and psychological consequences, exacerbated in the case of the trans members of the community who have to face a triple stigmatisation: (a) by society at large for being Black/Latinx; (b) by their own ethnic community for their gender nonconformity and (c) by the gay male community for being women. Bailey writes about the existence of an either explicit or implicit deal in families of colour “that requires one to hide (suppress) or dispense with one’s nonnormative genders or sexualities in order to remain a full-fledged part of the biofamily and the biohome and to benefit from the shelter, clothing, food, and other resources that family and home are believed to provide” (2013, 86–87) and, he continues, “[f]or Black LGBT youth in particular, noncompliance, more often than not, results in him or her being forced to live in intolerable and unstable housing conditions or utter homelessness” (2013, 87). This is the situation Blanca has to face in the series: She was expelled from home when her mother discovered she was transgender, lived in the streets until rescued by mother Elektra, who introduced her in the ballroom culture, and later, when her mother dies and she decides to attend her funeral, she is violently confronted by her brother Manny who, addressing her as if she were a gay man, reminds her that she is not welcomed in the family: “Nobody wants you here, child molester. I know all about how you fags corrupt kids” (“Mother’s Day” 35:18–35:22). This kind of discrimination and stigmatisation also comes from within the LGBTQ+ community at large as proved by the refusal to admit trans women in general, and trans women of colour in particular, in gay bars2: Blanca meets Lulu, a child from the House of Abundance she wants to recruit for her own house, at a gay bar in Manhattan and when they ask for a drink the bartender clearly states that they are not welcomed there: “We don´t like women in here. This is a gay bar” (“Access” 22:24) and when Blanca asks to talk to the manager, this one just sentences: “The New York City nightlife is segregated” (“Access” 23:33) refusing their admission. This triple stigmatisation, together with the difficulties they find to get access to a stable job and a regular income due, among other factors, to their poor educational credentials, illustrates the extreme vulnerability and precariousness they go through. Louis F. Graham et al., in their study on the importance of social support for Black transgender women in Detroit, confirm the severe difficulties they find to overcome this vulnerability on an individual level: The limited data available suggest that access to health care and availability of social support are low, while drug use, homelessness, unemployment, discrimination, prevalence of HIV seropositivity, engagement in sex work, experiences of violence, depression, and suicide are high among transgender individuals and may be even greater among African American transgender individuals. (2014, 101) Pose acknowledges sociological evidence showing how prostitution and drug dealing are the only sources of income for many members of the community. But vulnerability requires recognition first to be overcome. Individuals must accept their vulnerable condition and must acknowledge interpellation by an Other who, in turn, recognises that very same condition in him/herself. Following Jean-Luc Nancy’s reasoning, it is only in that interaction between a Self and an Other that the Self is constituted as an autonomous and isolated entity. In the Preface to his Inoperative Community, he states that: the mode of existence and appropriation of a “self” (which is not necessarily, nor exclusively, an individual) is the mode of an exposition in common and to the in-common, and that this exposition exposes the self even in its “in itself,” in its “ipseity,” and in its own distinctiveness, in its isolation or in its solitude. Only a being-in-common can make possible a being-separated. (1991, xxxvii) In his discussion of a contemporary concept of community, Nancy rejects the liberal conception of the subject as autonomous individual and proposes instead a relational subject (being-with or being-in-common) who can only be constituted as such in the very act of sharing with others. Judith Butler seems to agree with this same perspective about the Self in relation to the Oher when, discussing the question of mourning, she states: For if I am confounded by you, then you are already of me, and I am nowhere without you. I cannot muster the “we” except by finding the way in which I am tied to “you,” by trying to translate but finding that my own language must break up and yield if I am to know you. You are what I gain through this disorientation and loss. This is how the human comes into being, again and again, as that which we have yet to know. (2004, 49) The human (and non-human) being, as stated by Carrasco-Carrasco in her chapter in this same volume, is necessarily a being-with, a being-in-common and only in that relational axis individuation appears. When that mutual dependency is acknowledged, vulnerable bodies, far from assuming a passive position of victimhood, can start acting as an autonomous and assertive “inoperative community” regardless of age, provide parental (Nancy 1991) that comes into existence in the very exposure of the commonality of its constituent selves. Ballroom culture defined as “a community and network of Black and Latina/o women, men, and transgender women and men who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, straight, and queer” (Bailey 2011, 367) functions as such an inoperative community. Starting in Harlem in the 1920s,3 the ballroom has always been considered a protective space for Black and Latinx individuals who felt stigmatised both by society at large and by their own ethnic community due to their gender and sexual expression. The two main components of this culture—houses and balls—provide a livable life, understood as a normatively sanctioned life (Butler 2004, xv), for those who feel deprived of it: Houses function as families whose main purpose is to organize elaborate balls and to provide support for their children to compete in balls as well as to survive in society as marginalized members of their communities of origin. Houses offer their children multiple forms of social support, a network of friends, and a social setting that allows free gender and sexual expression. Ultimately, houses within the ballroom community constitute figurative, and sometimes literal, “homes” for the diverse range of members involved in them. (Arnold and Bailey 2009, 174) Apart from Blanca, as explained before, Angel and Damon were also expelled from home by their biofamilies when coming out as a trans woman (Angel) and as a gay man (Damon). The three of them come from very traditional Latinx and Black families that do not accept their sexual and gender presentation. Consequently, they have to leave their homes and live in the streets until they find a shelter and new opportunities in the world of the balls and houses. Damon’s story is presented in the first episode: he is a young boy living in Allentown, Pennsylvania who loves dancing, but has to conceal that passion from his father who is laughed at by his co-workers for having a sissy son who is a dancer. When his father finds him dancing in his room and questions him about his manliness, Damon proudly declares that he is a dancer and gay. He is then violently beaten and immediately expelled from home and family, after hearing from his father: “You’re dead to me” (“Pilot” 10:53–14:19). Disowned and kicked out by those who supposedly should have protected them, these characters have to earn their living alone, homeless and without any kind of economic and social support. This is precisely what the houses fight against when offering protection and encouragement for personal and communal fulfilment: “Houses are led by mothers (Butch Queens, Femme Queens, or Women) and fathers (Butch Queens, Butches, or Men) who, regardless of age, provide parental guidance to numerous Black LGBT people who have been devalued and rejected by their blood families, religious institutions of their childhood, and society at large” (Bailey 2013, 92–93). They function as “alternative families” (Bailey 2011, 367) that try to redress the emotional, economic and social imbalance their members endured after being repudiated by their biofamilies: House members consider themselves a family and carry out a whole host of activities together to fortify their kin ties, such as taking trips, holding family dinners and reunions, celebrating birthdays, shopping for a ball, bailing each other out of jail, and even fighting with and for one another. Although the ties that bind members together in the Ballroom community are not biological, kin ties are, nonetheless, viewed, undertaken, and experienced as real. Unlike Ballroom members’ blood families, emphasis is placed on the labor involved in developing and maintaining relationships that add meaning to the house. (Bailey 2013, 95–96) Houses somehow reproduce the structure of biofamilies with a maternal and, at times, a paternal figure who take care of their children and encourage their autonomy and self-esteem both in the competitive world of the ball scene and in society at large; and, in a similar way, ball competitions reproduce the regimes of ethnicity, sex, gender and sexuality sanctioned by heteronormativity. In both cases, the subject has to be able to convey realness to the role they play. It is not enough pretending to be; the performer must really be, so that he/she can be read as what the others expect him/her to be: “to be ‘real’ is to minimize or eliminate any sign of deviation from gender and sexual norms that are dominant in a heteronormative society. In other words, the person must embody the so-called markings of femininity or masculinity” (Bailey 2011, 378). As a consequence, femme queens are the only ones who compete in feminine categories and assume maternal roles and butch queens do the same with masculine categories and paternal roles.4 Realness demands a complete adherence to heteronormative sexual and gender norms, and so it could seem that, far from dismantling the gender binary, ballroom culture, in both houses and balls, insists on perpetuating it. However, realness can also be read as a strategy for survival and resistance, as “the efforts of [the ballroom community’s] members to avoid discrimination, violence and exclusion” (Bailey 2011, 377). In the ballroom, a person both expresses his/her gender and sexual identity and his/her sexual and gender presentation which is the one offered to be read by the others, and these two positionalities do not necessarily coincide. In brief, this community, in its inclusivity, encourages gender bending, the free movement in the interstices of the gender and sexual binary. The ballroom is consequently a place for protection and reassertion but also a contesting place, a transitional locus that both anchors its members to a reality imposed by heteronormativity and frees them from that same stigmatising reality. The ball scene offers its members’ transmogrified bodies the opportunity of (un)becoming other(s) (Sullivan 2006). Transmogrification, defined as “strange or grotesque transformation: transformation that is characterized by distortion, exaggeration, extravagance, and, as the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary puts it, ‘unnatural combinations’” (Sullivan 2006: 553), aims hence at both strangeness and identity since, on the one hand the trans body attempts to become real through transgressive corporeal modifications while, on the other, strongly endeavours to be real in an essentialist way.

Using a deconstructive lens to view place, we realize that place was never actually place at all. Rather, place was always already space. Given the pervasive power of heteronormativity (and other such power structures), this understanding is important. Queer utopic cuts flip the meaning inherent in ideologically settled places and turns them into ideologically contested spaces, thereby opening new zones of queer freedom. This space-based approach also has particular significance for the heterotopic nature of queer utopic cuts. By cutting back against heteronormativity, queer utopic spaces seek to portray the contestable state of gender and sex. If it is true that the spatial metaphor invites scholars to understand the multiple conflicting realities experienced by people as contingent rather than static, then a space-based understanding is integral to understanding these spaces and what they attempt to change. Moments of queer utopia must then exist contingently in particular spaces, queering the heteronormative reality created in that location. ACT UP, for example, takes this space-based approach to queerness as well. The point of these demonstrations is to “occupy a space that’s not supposed to be yours” and to “usurp public spaces.”141 In other words, by protesting, ACT UP sought to change spaces that were predominantly heteronormative into spaces of queerness. ACT UP thus further reminds us that a space-based approach to queerness is valuable. For the purpose of thinking about the cut then, a space-based approach has a few implications. This approach reminds us that heteronormativity, while hegemonic in modern-society, does not exist uniformly throughout society. Rather, this power structure manifests itself in particular ways. Because of this, the queer utopic cut must operate differently throughout time and space, rejecting a monolithic approach towards fighting back. If the cut is as fluid and space-based as I have suggested it is, then the ability for this queer utopic cut to create long-lasting change is stymied. In other words, if heteronormativity is constantly changing based on particular spaces, then so must the cut portraying a better future. There cannot, by definition, be one giant cut that stops heteronormativity, but rather multiple smaller space-based cuts that chip away at this power structure. If it is true that queer utopias are confined to particular spaces, I have stumbled across an interesting conundrum. How can they create long-lasting change in a system of power that pervades other spaces? If they do only serve to fight back in particular spaces, rather than targeting the power structure itself, then aren’t they simply cutting off each of the heads of the hydra separately, allowing room for the other heads to grow back while in battle? I believe that the solution to this problem lies in the aftermath of these cuts, through the creation of queer worldmaking and queer counterpublics. But before I turn to a discussion of those concepts, I want to further discuss the moments in which queer utopic cuts occur, and how they change the reality of the spaces they occupy. Queer Relationality When Gust Yep wrote “The Violence of Heteronormativity in Communication Studies,” he wanted to further “make sense of the individual and collective suffering produced by nonnormativity.”142 He recognizes that heteronormativity, even in academia, can create “deep feelings of isolation, worthlessness, and shame to diminished access to opportunities, decreased life chances, and multiple forms of death.”143 In response, he questions how queer individuals can “maintain wholeness” in a world that fundamentally wishes they did not exist.144 This, I believe, is the major effect of the queer utopic cut in the moment—it creates a space that opens room for queer individuals to maintain wholeness in a world that rejects them. In other words, queer utopic moments establish a kind of queer relationality. Queer relationality can be thought of as a kind of affective connection, a communal understanding of relations between and among queer individuals. It creates a sense of intimacy, a kind of interdependence that exists between people who are not wanted by the outside world. Much like Judith Butler’s work on cohabitational vulnerability and mutual dependency,145 queer relationality recognizes a world in which queer people need to care for and about each other. It involves “closeness, deep knowing, mutual attunement, sensuality, and eroticism that could range from fleeting to enduring, and spheres of desire;” it creates an emotional interconnection that oftentimes cannot be explained through discourse.146 In many ways, queer relationality reflects the discursive components of rhetorics of difference as elucidated by Lisa Flores. For Flores, A rhetoric of difference includes repudiating mainstream discourse and espousing self-and group-created discourse. Through the rejection of the external and creation of the internal, marginalized groups establish themselves as different from stereotyped perceptions and different from dominant cultures…. The naming that comes about through a rhetoric of difference allows groups to reflect on the uniqueness of their identity. Pride and solidarity within one’s group are essential.147 Queer relationality rejects the mainstream, discursive construction of queer individuals and instead invites queers to create their own communities of discourse. By arguing for intimate interrelations designed to protect queer folks, queer relationality calls for a unique kind of pride and solidarity within the queer community. The process also establishes a separate space by deconstructing heteronormative conceptions of queerness itself. In doing so, queer relationality invites queer people to “transform their space into a home,” thereby embodying this rhetoric of difference.148 Queer relationality thus pushes towards what Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa call “El Mundo Zurdo,”149 or the left-handed world, “the place where the misfits suddenly fit.”150 Queer relationality, however, cannot only be understood in terms of difference. To do so risks replicating an understanding of queerness as solely abject or difference, as theorists such as Lee Edelman have famously done.151 This is not to suggest that Flores’ work does this—indeed, in her work, Chicana feminists find their agency within this difference—but given the understanding of queer as abject resulting from queer anti-relationality, we risk stumbling into queerness as abject through an analysis of difference. Instead, we must draw from queerness as abject to think of queer bonds in a simultaneously positive and negative way, being defined through a kind of difference but also through a connection between individuals. This is what Joshua Weiner and Damon Young describe as a bond of extimacy, their psychoanalytic reading of intimacy: What do we make of the fact that today we experience so many social spaces in which queer bonds—however precariously and temporarily—manage to appear through something other than just an act of defiance or resistance?.... We suggest that some ‘we,’ however fugitive, has always appeared in the interstices of historically conditioned homophobic interpellation, perhaps in the simplest experience of two or more people realizing their queer desire for each other…. Our queer bonds are not merely a bulwark of resistance, via determinate negation, of the normative socio-symbolic order. It is on the terrain of a social death that a ‘we’ precipitates into a mobile and precarious assemblage perennially in excess of the negations it survives…. If we are ‘intimate’ when we can recognize a symbolically articulated commonality, whence a shared identity, here we should perhaps speak of ‘extimacy.’152 Extimacy takes Edelman’s starting point that the queer is abject and Flores’ rhetoric of difference as a site of social agency to develop new modes of queer bonds. If queer relationality and bonds can be thought of as a form of extimacy, then the creation of these bonds renders agency out of that which cannot have agency—mainly, the abject—and queers the very starting point of interpersonal relations. This process thus imagines a queer future where heteronormativity does not define queerness in such a violent manner. Extimacy then establishes a bond that “occasions a certain discursive, erotic and political transconnectivity, and configures a relationality that persists in fraught ways, whether acknowledged or not.”153 This is a benefit to the queer utopic cut in the moment. By revealing a world in which their relations are not demonized but rather celebrated, queer people are invited to create powerful interconnections. These interconnections create a zone of comfort and love that reminds queer individuals that they do deserve to even be. Some of those interconnections may be long lasting, and some may be temporary. Regardless, in this manner, the queer utopic cut operates as a kind of queer survival strategy. By “continuing to unpack normativities, and exploring queer relationalities,”154 the queer utopic cut inverts the space it exists within to open room for queer life to exist. This may only be momentary and aspirational, but just the invocation of queer utopias can create positive change. A tangible example of queer relationality is the Positive Space Campaign, a social campaign taking place at various universities in Canada designed to help alleviate heteronormativity by inverting the university space to create room for queerness. Through the distribution of posters and buttons and the creation of public rallies and workshops, this campaign contributes “to an imagined space that confronts homophobia and heteronormativity in the hopes of creating a campus that embraces sexual and gender diversity.”155 By fighting heteronormativity, this campaign envisions a university environment in which queer students can freely be themselves. It operates as a kind of “'powerful intervention in the routine lexicon’ of the hallways or other university space,” and “disrupts the dominance of heteronormativity simply by being visible and drawing attention to the fact that LGBTQ people are on campus.”156 These campaigns can and do have a positive impact by opening the space for queer life to exist. I’d like to think that this is enough, but, unfortunately, it is not. Given the pervasive nature of heteronormativity, this power structure adapts to this space of queer life and boxes it in. Heteronormativity may even seep into a queered space, re-claiming it as its own bastion of normalcy. Thus, while creating a tear in the fabric of heteronormative power is valuable, it cannot be all that the queer utopic cut does. Rather, there must be beneficial, long-term after effects of the cut for creating lasting change. Queer Worldmaking One of these important after effects comes in the form of queer worldmaking. This process can be thought of as developing a world outside of heteronormativity for queers to thrive. In Disidentifications, Muñoz says The concept of worldmaking delineates the ways in which performances-- both theatrical and everyday rituals-- have the ability to establish alternative views of the world. These alternative vistas are more than simply views or perspective; they are oppositional ideologies that function as critiques of oppressive regimes of ‘truth’ that subjugate minoritarian people.157 Queer worldmaking is a process of creating an entirely queer world, challenging the heteronormative structure that exists now. Through queer worldmaking, queer utopic cuts utilize their heterotopic nature to create new spaces that explore a world absent heteronormativity. This is “a messy enterprise driven by a vision of another world, another way of living,” that fights for a more equitable future.158 Queer worldmaking thus consists of “practices and relationships that contest the logics of compulsory heteronormativities,” challenging normative understandings of identity and society through new futures.159 This is not an aspirational push, but one that engages in “the contemporary situation with its historical legacies, varying interests, and much more.”160 In other words, queer worldmaking is a kind of world-shattering that draws a new world from the one that currently exists. This establishes a kind of Blochian concrete utopia. Queer worldmaking is thus an important part of the queer utopia that the queer utopic cut sets out to establish. It “engender[s] a now and a future with promise and hope that must not be discarded as always already hetero- and homonormative,” imbuing a vision for a more perfect world. As Muñoz even says, “queer world-making, then, hinges on the possibility to map a world where one is allowed to cast pictures of utopia and to include such pictures in any map of the social.”161 In other worlds, queer worldmaking is the perfectly queer part of queer utopianism, embracing a queerness sans heteronormativity.162 Queer worldmaking, however, cannot be conceptualized in a conventional manner. Gust Yep indicates that queer worldmaking consists of creating spaces where “individual freedom and collective possibilities” are freely explored;163 Thomas Nakayama and Charles Morris think of queer worldmaking as “not a strategic plan, organized by anyone, but a bottom-up engagement with the everyday.”164 In this manner, the road to creating a queer world is rhizomatic, rejecting straight paths in favor of queer ones that turn and bend along the way. In creating a queer world, the world as we know it is reformulated and becomes radically different. A rhetorical approach to queer worldmaking is necessary to understand how it comes to life. If it is true that “queer world-making is a process brought to life, in part, by the vernacular contestation of discourse,” then an approach that starts from that discourse is necessary to theorize this cut.165 In other words, queer worldmaking becomes operationalized through the rhetorical invocation of the queer utopic cut. This happens by inverting the space that the queer utopic cut occupies. By undermining the normative and embracing the non-normative, the queer utopic cut rewrites what a space means. In revealing a world sans heteronormativity, this cut divulges a vision of a queer world. It is a performative rhetoric in the Butlerian sense, simultaneously performing and becoming the world that it seeks to create; it “attempts to remake the world in its image.”166 In this manner, the queer utopic cut exists within a similar position to queer kissing for Morris and John Sloop; it exhibits a “heightened sense of kairos,” insofar as it “effects a powerful affirmation for queer communities… with potentially profound material and symbolic implications for the constitution of sexuality.”167 The cut may also push towards queer worldmaking in a visual manner.168 In fact, this “visual affirmation of queer lives” is oftentimes “the first step in instigating productive modes of world-making.”169 Jeffrey Bennett takes this as a starting point in his analysis of the queer worldmaking of the Born This Way blog, a website designed to portray the queerness of its contributors. If they so wish, people visiting the blog may upload pictures of themselves as children, portraying images of queerness at a young age. These pictures may include photographs of boys wearing dresses and acting in effeminate manners or girls wearing male costumes. For these contributors, then, their queerness was showing at such a young age that they could have uncovered and revealed it much sooner than they did. However, due to internalized and external homophobia and heteronormativity, these contributors did not understand their queerness until they were much older. In these instances, the visual representations of queerness portray an imagined utopia whereby the contributors to this blog could have been openly queer at a younger age.170 When ACT UP sought to redefine what it meant to be somebody living with AIDS, they were actively utilizing queer worldmaking to change societal understandings of what it means to be someone with AIDS. As they protested, AIDS activists articulated a new way of conceptualizing people with AIDS in order to create this queer world. This change was not only rhetorical, changing the literal discourse used to describe people with AIDS, but was also visual, as demonstrators used images of their AIDS-filled bodies to re-write what it was to be someone with AIDS. ACT UP is thus a prime example of queer worldmaking. In addition, queer worldmaking acts as a form of healing. In creating separate worlds through forms of queer relationality, the queer utopic cut reminds queer people that heteronormativity is not an innate phenomenon, but rather one to be deconstructed. For example, Benny LeMaster writes about the Trans Empowerment Group (TEG for short), a campus-based support group for transgender students. Through ethnographic data, LeMaster explores the queer worldmaking process of this group as transgender students engage each other in group meetings. For the students involved in TEG, meeting spaces push towards a queer world. One of the ways this is operationalized is through the laughter of the students. As LeMaster says, “We all laugh. Through our collective laughter, we process our relative intersectional degrees of deviation from the mythical norm.”171 Through this laughter, the students involved in the group simultaneously engage in a learning process whereby they become more familiar with the process of deviation from heteronormativity—and thus push towards making a queer world—and experience a temporary, cathartic release from the norms they are consistently constrained by. Thus, by envisioning and pushing towards a queer world rhetorically, the queer utopic cut can begin to heal the wounds inflicted by heteronormativity. The telos of queer worldmaking is not to suggest an immediate change, even if queer worldmaking does have valuable, immediate effects, like queer healing. Rather, this is a longterm project—the world cannot be revolutionized in a day. Thus, queer worldmaking must be a part of the afterlife of a queer utopic cut. In much the same way that Morris and Sloop argue that “in order to achieve a queer world, a ‘critical visual mass’ of same-sex public kissing must exist,” the call for queer worldmaking must be repeated endlessly to counter heteronormativity.172 Queer worldmaking thus demands an endless repetition of the queer utopic cut.

A second group of scholars, represented here by Godfried Asante, Shadee Abdi, Lore LeMaster and Satoshi Toyosaki, and Aaron Sachs, explore the inhabited dimensions of queer relationalities. These essays highlight the experience of queer relationality. While dramatically different in certain ways, these essays generally center around detailed descriptions of moments of queer relationality; how they are subjectively embodied, navigated, and understood; and how they relate to and challenge normativities, systems of power, and hegemonic frameworks of sensemaking. Engaging with these essays altogether demonstrates the diversity, complexity, and profoundness of queer relationalities. These articles demonstrate the contextuality and cultural specificity of queer relationalities, but they also describe certain commonalities that exist in relation to the cross-cultural navigation of queer relationalities. They demonstrate that queer relationalities take multiple forms, but also have a certain identifiable coherence—even as they are being described and engaged with in diverse ways. In the first essay in this section, “Unexpected Intimacies: Exploring Sasso Relationality in Postcolonial Ghana,” Godfried Asante explores queer rela- tionalities in a Ghanaian cultural context and advances the concept of Sasso relationality. Asante’s essay richly explores the nuanced relationships between the embodiment and navigation of queer relationalities and culture, power, language, history, colonialism, and globalization. After defining Sasso rela- tionality, Asante presents two narratives that illustrate the concept and posi- tion it as being an example of queer relationality that resembles but does not rely on normative Western sensemaking frameworks of intelligibility. Indeed, Asante argues, Sasso relationality does not merely exist outside of these normative frameworks. It challenges them. In the second essay, “Worldmaking with Aberoo: Queer Familial Relationality with/for Iranian Americans,” Shadee Abdi evokes the Iranian concept of aberoo to challenge normative colonial Western cultural logics— namely logics surrounding the family, the closet, and binary thinking. Abdi describes aberoo as a culturally specific form of face-saving that allows queer Iranian Americans to save face in relation to normative cultural values and familial structures while also maintaining their queer identities. Abdi presents 10 narratives from participants who identify as queer Iranians in the diaspora or queer Iranian Americans, ultimately arguing that aberoo constitutes a culturally specific form of queer relationality that challenges a variety of Western norms, which include but are not limited to norms surrounding sexuality. In Lore LeMaster and Satoshi Toyosaki’s essay, “Ally as an Emerging Critical Orientation: Performing Praxis-Oriented Ally Subjectivity,” the authors explore and challenge power dynamics in relation to the concepts of ally and allyship. LeMaster and Toyosaki describe the problematic definition and manifestation of allyship in and beyond the neoliberal academy in relation to whiteness, heteronormativity, and cisnormativity. They explore and chal- lenge this through a description of their relationship to themselves, each other, and the academy. Ultimately, LeMaster and Toyosaki intervene in the concept of allyship. They center race, gender, power, and subjectivity in their essay, eventually advancing a vision of allyship that is more firmly rooted in queer relationality and praxis rather than in identity. Finally, in the essay, “Family Pictures: The Queer Relationalities of Multigenerational Queer Family,” Aaron Sachs advances the concept of (queer)spawn relationality. Through a detailed exploration of the queer struc- ture and dynamics of his family, including the fact that he was born to lesbian parents using sperm from a sperm donor and that his daughter was also born to lesbian parents using his sperm, Sachs defines the figure of the (queer) spawn and argues that the (queer)spawn itself reinforces and challenges norms in relation to family, history, and biology. Additionally, Sachs notes that the (queer)spawn encapsulates, exemplifies, and adds to the conceptual tapestry of queer relationality. These essays have many commonalities. For example, they all highlight the fact that queer relationalities are multiple, profound, elusive, ephemeral, and are often unintelligible from hegemonic cultural vantage points. In addition to making specific moments of queer relationality intelligible, these essays make these moments come alive. They provide a nuanced vision of power and how queer relationalities exist in relation to it. These authors present queer rela- tionalities through a postmodern lens, illustrating that queer relationalities are subjective and that their navigation and interpretation depends substantially upon culture, context, power, and standpoint. Additionally, these authors present a dialectical vision of queer relationalities, often arguing overtly that queer relationalities have the capacity to simultaneously reflect, reproduce, and challenge normativities. While that is true, these essays all demonstrate the transformative potential of queer relationalities and their productive role in queer worldmaking. While these essays share many commonalities, they also have some crucial divergences. The divergences, however, profoundly illustrate the breadth of what queer relationalities can be, what they can do, how they relate to power, and how people interpret their significance. Each of these essays focus on queer relationalities at the micro, meso, and macro levels, but some of the essays in this section approach queer relationalities more explicitly in relation to transnational phenomena such as globalization, colonialism, and the trans- national movement of people and ideologies. Other articles focus more cen- trally on exploring queer relationalities in the context of culturally specific constructions such as family, academia, friendship, history, and time. While these essays might not adopt the same primary level of focus, each essay offers an intersectional and comprehensive exploration of how queer relationalities at the inhabited micro level relate to larger institutional, cultural, or global levels. Finally, each essay clearly describes the counterhegemonic potential of queer relationalities and their capacity to challenge and destabilize normativities.

Minoritarian subjects, such as sexual and gender non-normative peo- ple living under the regime of heteropatriarchy, have developed and practiced different ways of relating, engaging, and connecting with others that are largely unintelligible in the mainstream cultural imagina- tion (Muñoz, 2009; Yep, 2017, 2020). Although these practices and communication activities serve multiple purposes, including survival and connection, they can also produce and maintain marginalization, shame, and erasure through unintelligibility—schemas that establish the domains of the knowable and unknowable in a culture (Butler, 2009). Cultural unintelligibility creates and perpetuates epistemic injustice, a wrong perpetrated against minoritarian subjects in their capacity as knower and legitimate author of their own experiences (Martínez, 2013). In particular, two forms of epistemic injustice—hermeneutical injustice and testimonial injustice—are produced through unintelligibility (Fricker, 2007; Martínez, 2013). According to Fricker (2007), hermeneu- tical injustice occurs when there is a lack of interpretive resources and frameworks to make sense of certain social experiences (e.g., lack of vocabulary for talking about queer relationality) and testimonial injustice arises when prejudice deflates the credibility of the minoritarian speakers (e.g., people with normative sexuality discredit the experiences of sexual minorities or ignore queer forms of relating and connecting). As an academic enterprise focused on exploring, examining, and understanding diverse ways of relating, engaging, and connecting, the field of commu- nication and related disciplines appear particularly suited for studying queer relationality and to mitigate the unending epistemic injustice perpetrated against sexual and gender minoritarian subjects. Unfortunately, the communication discipline, at the present historical moment, has largely neglected, in Muñoz’s (2009) words, the immense and dynamic “lifeworld of queer relationality” (p. 6). The purpose of our special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality is to explore this vast lifeworld of modes of relating, engaging, and connecting by proposing a preliminary vocabulary and potential sense making mechanisms to register the experiences and relational formations of minoritarian sub- jects. As such, our project represents an initial step in the amelioration of hermeneutical and testimonial justice by enhancing the cultural intel- ligibility of queer relationality in multiple sites at this historical moment. In particular, the essays in this special issue explore the theoretical, methodological, and political potential of queer relationality in commu- nication studies and beyond.

As different ways of relating, engaging, and connecting under regimes of heteropatriarchy, queer relationality represents an embodied, material, sym- bolic, and political world of potentialities and possibilities—some of which have been enacted and actualized while others have yet to emerge (Muñoz, 2009; Yep, 2020). As such, queer relationality can be viewed as a fluid, expan- sive, and open territory for exploration, including its definitional parameters (Yep, 2017). In this section, we provide a sketch of the general features of queer relationality, explore cultural intelligibility and unintelligibility, and discuss power and the politics of unintelligibility.

In their book The Undercommons, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten propose an alternative social understanding of bad, unpayable debt. The condition for this understanding is the separation of debt and credit. These unpayable debts, which in a social sense are bad, black, queer debts, are not tied to credit; they break with both credit and the debt economy. ‘Credit is a means of privatization and debt a means of socialisation.’75 As long as debts are locked up in a house, a home, a state, or a community, debt serves only credit, which needs it to keep running efficiently. ‘But debt is social and credit is asocial. Debt is mutual. Credit runs only one way. But debt runs in every direction, scatters, escapes, seeks refuge.’76 These bad debts are endlessly distributed and dispersed debts. They are debts that for social reasons – for reasons of being with each other, rather than for economic or moral reasons – cannot be repaid. They are without obligations, without demands, and fail to balance the balance sheets.77 They are debts without a creditor – ‘the black debt, the queer debt, the criminal debt’78 – because they escape identity and do not refer back to a self. They lack autonomy but are full of affections. Practising bad debt corresponds with the ability to allow oneself to be affected by others, other people and other things; to be open, vulnerable, precarious: becoming-precarious as the ability to be affected. Only the bad debts preserve precariousness. Precarization and precarity, in contrast, serve credit and lead away from the social debts of care. Bad care debts are debts arising from ties and mutual dependencies that refuse to pass as autonomous individual and yield to its isolating bonds of time and identity. Black, queer care debts burst open the white masculinist economy of credit and the identity of creditors. These debts move in the expansion of differences and multiplicities as each and every single person owes something different.79 Taking queer social debts as the starting point leads to the fullness of social wealth, to excess in the now, not to a scarcity and lack that demands an accumulation of credit and doing things better in the future. Queer, black debtors seek mutual refuge, but not in the private, and not in a public realm differentiated from it. In the transversal fabrics of relations – the undercommons – which proliferate through time and space, a refuge is a site where precariousness is preserved, where the social, no longer separated from the political, creates ‘fugitive publics’80 that do not assign anyone a place, but allow the places to be occupied without categorizing them. Without borders or the debt of gratitude, the hospitality of radical inclusion lets debts proliferate. Seeking and granting refuge, moves, hides, and allows to begin anew. Becoming-precarious in the present, without a credit on the future, is not an individual undertaking. It is always a becoming-precarious together with others.

Richard Schechner tells us that performativity "points to a variety of topics, among them the construction of social reality, including gender and race" (110). Marvin Carlson further suggests that "(p]erformance can work within society precisely to undermine tradition to provide a site for the exploration of fresh and alternative structures and patterns of behavior" (15). Consequently, the performances are discussed here for their potential to reinvent and reformulate identity constructs. In order to evaluate this performative/ transgressive potential, Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of the carnival and Michel Foucault's ideas on discursive power must be foregrounded. The Bakhtinian carnival often involves identifying binary oppositions and inverting their hierarchical relationship. This may be evident in the representation of homosexuals as dominant providers (as occurs with Richard Hatch) or as romantic partners (as is evident with James Getzlaff): this practice inverts the alleged natural sexual order. In this context, the gay male is no longer a lone subject (of derision or enter-tainment); he plays a central role in the development and resolution of the narrative. In their analysis of the Bakhtinian carnival, Peter Stally-brass and Allon White have acknowledged the potential to shift "the very terms of the system itself by erasing and interrogating the relationships which constitute it" (58). The removal of traditional power bases which form cultural hegemony (such as the dominant role of the heterosexual male) may result in "a potent, populist, critical inversion of official worlds and hierarchies" (7). Reality television retains a great deal of "car-nivalesque potential" in the replacement of the heterosexual with the homosexual as the central impetus behind the narrative action. The narrative and the discursive performativity of gay cast members challenge established sites of power. This may be possible if we consider Michel Foucault's postulate that power is "everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere" (93). Foucault proposes that power can be fluid, a dynamic interaction between individuals, organizations, and hierarchies, as well as a source of resistance. Although the texts discussed here may be termed mainstream, the inclusion of gay performers generates the potential for resistance. Such opportunities may be created through the alliances between gay performers and producers or other cast members; relationships that challenge and overturn the idea of "heterocentric closure" • as a textual norm. In order to discuss this further, it is important to establish the textual and discursive circumstances that have contributed to the heightened visibility of gay identity within reality television. Competition oriented reality television and its romance with gay subjectivity (as illustrated in Survivor and Boy Meets Boy) is not a new development; it is further evidence of a progression initiated by The Real World.

These stories can be read in different ways, but here I draw out some points from what they say about making a living, getting by, living on (the work of survival) in relation to three interrelated aspects of the messy survival: disruptive migration/mobility narratives, hyper-precarization/transsexualization, and temporality. For both Brenda and Daniela, leaving their home countries was an almost unintentional culmination of complex, damaging circumstances they had spent long years navigating. While there was no material change in Daniela’s situation in Honduras, her subjective experience shifted in such a way that her life become suddenly intolerable. Her sudden fleeing, initially to Guatemala, was not in response to a particular threat, but rather it was an opportunistic escape from a present – and likely short – future of hardship and violence. So while it came about suddenly, it was an action immersed in a long past, and rooted in a notional future: her “destination” at that time was symbolic, for a life, a chance, somewhere else. Brenda had consistently tried to find ways to deal with things in the hope she could defy the odds and make things work in El Salvador, that something better was around the corner. Making her living there involved constant tradeoffs: I can stay in San Salvador if I can get less dangerous work, I can get that work as long as I present myself as a man; I can be trans and work as a vendor as long as I keep moving house. Brenda’s overriding response to adversity has been to stand her ground (a key part of her narrative is “facing up” to things), indeed she only left El Salvador when her life was directly threatened. The point here is that their migration is only relevant as another step in their complicated survival: certainly significant in opening up new possibilities, but raising new scenarios and challenges to navigate. Their mobility brings myriad material and emotional costs and paybacks. Their mobility also took some unexpected turns. Tapachula is a liminal border space, “southernised” as part of Mexico relative to the US and Canada to the north, and also at a national scale relative to the centre and north of Mexico. It is somewhere that is widely understood as a risky place for migrants in general, and GSD migrants in particular (recall UNHCR sending Daniela to the more “liberal” Mexico City for her “protection”). But as it turns out, for Brenda and Daniela it was somewhere that new possibilities unexpectedly came together. They both found it relatively easy to negotiate that small town’s institutional landscape, they found freedom and safety in anonymity there, and some political capital and practical leverage in being trans. The informality of the space was at times dangerous, and possibilities for prospering were limited, but that same informality opened up new possibilities of a more transformative survival: a new social recognition and vindication as trans women making a living outside sex work. It was a fleeting sensation and possibility that they both still think about now, years later; a feeling – perhaps more than the place itself – they wish to go back to. In moving to their “liberal” norths since then, ironically they have both ended up having to rely again on sex work to survive. This upending of tidy, liberal queer migration narratives of a northward path to liberation, perhaps speaks to Wright’s (2018, 106) hope that a transformational migration and queer politics can emerge, which “will necessitate a shift from a liberal politics of national inclusion to a dynamic theoretical-political framework capable of mapping the ever-increasing spatial sites at which borders are made and contested, and at which illegality and migrant precarity are challenged”. Although sex work has been central to their livelihoods over the years, Brenda and Daniela notably do not identify as sex workers, and both have a complicated and relationship with it (see also Kallock 2018). Their stories are marked by what this work has cost them emotionally and physically, by an on-going struggle to manoeuvre their way out of dependence on it, and also by the kinds of survival it has allowed. Certainly, sex work for them was a way to make money on being expelled from the family home, to rearticulate their lives in many of the new spaces they came to inhabit and to take responsibility for their survival (Prada et al. 2012), and in some ways (sometimes) it was also a (trans) space where they felt recognized and validated (see also Howe, Zaraysky, and Lorentzen 2008). Yet the transsexualization of sex work naturalizes their presence, feeding into the social imaginary that this is all they are good for (Prada et al. 2012), and makes it especially hard for them to carve out a different living. Their working lives can be seen as hyper-precarious, but not only in the sense of epitomizing the instability, unpredictability and temporariness lived by the migrant worker (Anderson 2010), but also more particularly in terms of the precarity of their short-lived, sporadic inroads into other, “decent” work. Their sense of self is deeply tied up with work, and they determinedly do not want sex work to define them, or to have to depend on it in the future.10 So, getting by in the short-term wrangles in their narratives with a longer-term resistance, a deeper desire to be socially seen through their labour. This leads to a final, related point, about the uncertain rhythms of the marginal (trans) lives: the fleeting opportunities, the interminable waiting, daily grind, the sudden ruptures. Time has been an underlying theme from the outset (indeed, it was what prompted me to start working longitudinally in the first place). Temporality here is queer not only in the sense of being an oppositional queer time (Halberstam 2005), but also in its messiness; it is not about past-present-future, but a staggered, irregular temporality. Uncertainty as an inspiration and constraint for action (Bjarnesen 2009) resonates strongly, but predictability may also have the same effect. In the sense of social navigation (Vigh 2006), the on-going struggle of perpetual marginal displacement – while acutely uncertain – is more about how the friction between uncertainty and all-too known constraints creates a kind of aliveness, of pushing the boundaries and testing the water. Daniela has particularly struggled with institutional time: she arrived in Mexico too soon (when nothing was in place), and tried to leave too late (after unknowingly exceeding an arbitrary period of eligibility). Her day-today life, in the city she has tried many times to leave, is in many ways a precarious rhythm of hand-to-mouth survival. In this sense, mobility and lack thereof may be temporal as well as spatial, such that time may itself come to be harmful, a cycle of daily precarity stretching into the future: a kind of temporal violence. Yet both Brenda and Daniela not only constantly seek new ways to chip away at the barriers to their goals, but they also resist the routine distancing of hopes and desires that comes with marginal mobility, through making a point of assuming responsibility for their actions, and regaining control of their imagined futures. Survival is on-going, messy and – in the face of such profoundly harmful injustice – radical work, but in Brenda’s words, “just as I survived all the times they have tried to kill me, I will survive this too”.

The relationships which enabled this work began in Tapachula, a town on the Mexico-Guatemala border, and an important regional hub for migrants crossing into Mexico by land. Among the people, I have met through many encounters in the “field” were eight Central American trans women with whom I would end up developing long-term research relationships, and two of whom are the focus here. I first met Daniela back in 2014 when she was staying at a migrant shelter in Tapachula, which I was visiting once a week. We saw each other regularly through the ups and downs of her time in Tapachula over the coming months, but it was not until she had moved away to Mexico City that we sat down, over the phone, to more intentionally piece together her story up to that point. We have kept in touch since then. I met Brenda in the summer of 2016, shortly after she arrived in Tapachula from El Salvador, through Yasmin, another long-term collaborator. I saw Brenda informally a few times before one afternoon in November of that year, when she invited me to come over to where she was staying to interview her. We spent many hours chatting and were joined later on by her then partner Carlos. We saw each other a few more times before she left Tapachula quite soon after that, and have stayed in fairly regular contact since then. Brenda has been particularly proactive in how she engages with the research, for example unexpectedly sending me films of herself to use in my presentations,4 and putting me in touch with people she thinks may be of interest. In personal terms, I get the sense that she sees this process as a kind of testament to her journey, and has made it part of her future hope in terms of what she aims to be able to “report back” in the next instalment. This work is inseparable from these affective, intimate (research) relationships which could not be easily accommodated within conventional ethical frameworks. Long a central concern of feminist research practice, intimacy in the research encounter has remained an ethically thorny and complex goal, largely since it pushes against hegemonic ethical norms (of distance and objectivity), while these structures nonetheless remain intact. The queering of ethics opens up new possibilities in this regard: intimate listening, as the “compassionate queering of borders between self and other” (Heckert 2010, 51), becomes method through a new queer ethics, no longer limiting the researcher’s ability to embed themselves within the complex intimacies of human relations, but rather – after Gibson-Graham (1999, in Detamore 2010, 173) – plotting out the path to a new “rich and prolific disarray” (see also Taylor 2016). Especially given their long-term nature, I struggle to describe these relationships of on-going attachments and obligations using conventional research vocabulary (respondent, participant), and find much resonance in Detamore’s (2010, 178) suggestion that what emerges is “something unnameable and uniquely special” that “looks much more like kinship”. It is a complicated and shifting ethical and emotional assemblage of expectations, responsibilities, vulnerabilities, privileges, anxieties, that at once pushes past the distinction between researcher and researched (for example Heckert 2010), while also grounding critical research praxis in the material and emotional nuts and bolts of the everyday. To reflect in a general sense on my position as a white, British, queer, cis-gender, female, academic resident in Mexico, would not resonate with this practice, since it would assume that these positions mapped evenly and steadily onto my research encounters. Thus, as Taylor (2016) posits, reflexivity becomes less introspectively focussed on the self-positioning and experience of the researcher, and more something which is enacted though on-going practice, a kind of “politics of intimacy” (Detamore 2010). In this way, the on-going, multiple ethical issues that emerge are continually interrogated through the research itself, often in open dialogue and reflection.

Furthermore, and relatedly, despite its importance for survival and its imbrication with mobility, work has been given surprisingly little attention in both queer migration and trans scholarship. Following emerging work on the queering of political economy (Lewis and Irving 2017) and of sexual economies (Smith 2015; Mai 2018), the paper responds to a need for scholarship that centres trans work as labour, and that roots work (including sex work) in the context of everyday, marginal survival. In this sense, while there is important emerging critical scholarship on migrant trans sex workers (for example, Mai 2018; Maldonado Macedo 2020), the absence of research on trans work as labour in a broader sense means to an extent that the transsexualization of sex work (Prada et al. 2012) is reinforced, and that sex work is perpetuated as the analytical lens through which trans labour is viewed. Here I am interested in putting sex work into broader perspective within the context of trans working lives, and in turn to shed light on the material realities of making a “queer” living. That messy survival is enacted in the margins is not incidental. On the contrary, if marginality is seen not as isolation or exclusion from the centre, but rather as the meeting of centre and periphery, then the margins are a productive zone of contact (indeed, might the structure of all things not be seen as most meaningful, and powerful, at their edges, in encounter with the other?). This contact, when imbued with power and scale, becomes a productive friction (see Tsing 2005): dynamic, harmful, transformative. In this way, the margins may be seen as sites of negotiation and navigation, of engagement and resistance (Hooks 1989). Through a queer lens, such an understanding of the margins brings to mind the “negotiations we make in seeking to fashion our existences” (Romesburg 2012, 120), and it underpins the realities of messy survival. This notion of navigation also informs how marginal mobilities are understood here, resonating strongly with Rogaly’s (2015) observation that there is no hierarchy in experiences of spatial mobility: a short-distance move or a set of everyday mobilities might be as meaningful (and/or harmful) to an individual as an international journey. Moreover, from a critical mobilities perspective, migrant mobility may be framed as on-going, complex, inherently unjust, and as much to do with fixity and stasis as flows and movement (e.g. Hannam, Sheller, and Urry 2006). In this sense, a less normative approach to mobility is useful in disrupting conventional migration and asylum narratives and framing mobility “as neither a privilege nor a predicament, but an engagement and entanglement with the lived environment that influences our outlooks and maneuverings” (Bjarnesen and Vigh 2016, 13). Vigh’s (2006, 14) concept of social navigation as “the tactical movement of agents within a moving element”, as “motion within motion” speaks eloquently to the realities of marginal mobility at different scales. This not only evokes the idea of the constant flux of displacement, but also – echoing the discussion of marginality above – frames agency in a more nuanced way, as a kind of spatial–temporal assemblage. In this way, movement as navigation may be just as messy as the celebrated messiness (Love 2016) of the subjects of queer theory. An important part of this messiness is certainly temporal, in terms of acute uncertainty for those on the move, “that inspires action as much as it constrains it” (Bjarnesen 2009, 131), and the unpredictability of migration governance (Griffiths 2014). But beyond this, an explicitly queer, trans framing is needed here. Useful in this regard is first, Romesburg’s (2012) historical account of “the magnetic effects of innovative agency and immanent foreclosure” (119) in the life of comic and female impersonator Rae Bourbon’s and the mobilities they pursued “to belong meaningfully in the world” (121). The account sheds light on “how trans moves us” in both spatial and affective ways, noting that “those striving to produce livable lives beyond the confines of heteronormative fusions of sex/gender/sexuality congruence need all the tools they can deploy” (120). Second, making the case for queer (migrant) lives to be read as “messy”, Manalansan IV (2014, 99) finds that “mess provides a vibrant analytical frame and a visceral phenomenological grip on the exigencies of marginalized queers – especially those who do not occupy the valorized homonormative spaces of the contemporary West”. Moving away from “necropolitical/necrophilic accounts” to focus on the “‘aliveness’ of these [working class immigrant] queers” (2014, 100), they see mess not as limited to queer bodies, objects, and desires, but also – significantly – as related to processes, behaviours, and situations. In line with the understanding of margins outlined above, aliveness may also be read as radical survival: as resistance which ruptures necropolitical orders of death and violence, through practices of survival which allow hope for the future to also stay alive (Lucero Rojas 2020). In turn, then, here the idea of messy survival speaks to the unexpected, contradictory, disorderly and uncertain ways of “living on (Perl 2019) in the face of profoundly harmful injustice. It echoes the ways in which, as Romesburg (2012, 120) notes, quality of life in part “gets achieved through demanding, by the practice of our own messy lives, something more”, and specifically uses this framework to explore the intersections between work, mobility and trans subjectivity.

To begin with, the performativity perspective entails a new ontology— or at least leads us to rethink our ontological commitments. Revision of ontology takes a form of epistemological scandal, for many generations of scholars were and still are socialized with the idea of emancipated science for which a reference to an independent ‘reality’ at least does not compli- cate further inquiry and most often is not very problematic at all. The per- formativity perspective challenges these views and opens up the whole new ontological domain of ‘economic things’5—the diversity of financial prod- ucts as both descriptions and their references (Muniesa 2014); theoretical claims embodied in a rule or in a ‘market device’ (Callon 2007a, b); the staging of consumer qualities provoked by the marketing mechanisms (Araujo et al. 2010); and so on. This ‘reality’ populated by human and non-human ‘actants’ is complex, plural, malleable, and contingent; to explore it, non-conventional ways are needed—prompted, again, by these very ontological innovations.6 It would be wrong to assert that a unified ontology is being formu- lated. Rather, many different ideas are currently tried out, but all of them somehow inspire new general interpretations of what the (social) world is and how it works. In particular, the performativity perspective leads us to focus on agency distributed among ‘individuals,’ ideas, devices, and material practices—reinforced by many contemporary accounts of situ- ated and distributed cognition (Hutchins 1995; Clark 2011; Herrmann- Pillath 2010, 2013).7 This implies rethinking the way institutional reality is organized, and reconceptualizing the opposition between the natural and the artificial—for the reality we live in is always already an institu- tional one. Although one still could focus on rules and conventions as stuff of the everyday life (Searle 2005; Herrmann-Pillath 2012; Guala, this volume), performativity studies suggest abandoning or radically revis- ing individualistic accounts of agency. For them, a convention is always already embodied in the world, and it is this unstable, heterogeneous, and contingent reality that lets individual agency or self-consciousness emerge. Institutional reality is not just ‘socially constructed’ or provoked from the outside—it is also self-provoking. The neorealist turn in philosophy (e.g., in Bryant et al. 2011), although not reducible to or fully reconcilable with the STS perspectives, is just another version of this general change of ontological sensitivity (Barad 2003; Law 2008). Another overarching tendency consists in rethinking the place of language in social life. This is a huge theme in itself, but performativity perspective is quite naturally led in this direction due to the work of its progenitors, notably Wittgenstein and Austin. As this volume testifies, lan- guage reality remains an inherent part of the performativity accounts. How can our language—and, by analogy, our theories, our reflexive attempts— be intertwined with the sociality of our existence? In a narrower sense, new words, new terms and concepts, once introduced, may define their own realities (Ferraro et al. 2005). But all other kinds of mediatory phe- nomena, or ‘mediating instruments’ (Miller and O’Leary 2007)—rules, technologies, incentives—can be rephrased as signs and/or speech acts.8 Economic things often come about after being written, as in the case of accounting (Vosselman 2014). Moreover, many economic entities, such as prices or organizations, can also be subject to this linguistic reinterpreta- tion. The new understanding of ‘reality’ involves grasping it as a language phenomenon—without, however, indefinitely expanding the boundaries of language. The challenge is to properly invest our linguistic intuitions into broader frameworks. Finally, there is a distinct politics of performativity. At their inception, performativity studies were concerned with the tendencies of economiza- tion, with economic theories imposing themselves onto the non-economic realms. At stake here are mutual autonomy, recognition, and tensions between the economic and the non-economic (or ‘the social’). Now, a critical task is to reveal the genealogy of economization, to stop treat- ing particular social structures as pre-given, to see them being constantly produced and reproduced, and sometimes to reveal a hypocrisy of cer- tain practices—claiming to involve naturalistic or laissez-faire attitudes but actually doing otherwise (see also Muniesa, this volume). The concern is, of course, with the growing standardization and homogenization of the social, with homo oeconomicus and economic regimes asserting themselves, as it were; with quantification (Porter 1995, 2008), ‘framing,’ and ‘dis- entanglement’ penetrating into deeper structures of our communities (for critiques of this kind, see Marglin 2008). All kinds of more recent debates around ‘libertarian paternalism’ are also important for the political aspect of performativity (see e.g., White 2013).

All in all, recent performativity studies inscribe economics in the ‘jun- gle’ of the social and thus occupy an uneasy position between economists and their critics. Of course, there might still be economists who believe that they solely are entitled to reflect upon their discipline; and critics of economics who condemn the performativity perspective for its collusion with the foe. But we hope that both of these positions will prove unten- able and eventually drop its radicalism, for it is not wise to see malicious criticism in any attempt to consider economics from outside, and it is even less so to ignore—or to uncompromisingly oppose—economics’ and economists’ entanglement in modern societies. But in what sense is the performativity of economics, once it establishes economists’ involvement, able to influence economics? To be sure, econo- mists themselves, unlike management scholars, sociologists, anthropolo- gists, political scientists, or cultural theorists, pay little attention to the idea of performativity. However, we suggest that, although economists rarely read and cite the literature from other social sciences, the general cultural and social context does matter both for their attitudes and their work. The general patterns of public opinion and intellectual trends (e.g., in poverty and inequality issues) do make a difference for them. Whenever public atmosphere and general cultural norms change, economists will also take account of the general performative consequences of their and others’ work and eventually embark upon building a more reflexive—and, per- haps, more responsible—social science. So, how does the performativity of economics matter? Perhaps the most immediate answer is that this perspective illuminates the role played by economic theories in our social life, in individual and collective sense- making, in struggles of visions becoming social struggles, and in the sta- bilization of collective practices. From vague ‘conditions of felicity’ for performative speech acts, we now move to the complex constitution of the social—with all the renewed significance of ontology, language, and poli- tics we referred to above. After the turn, we cannot ignore anymore that economies are permeated and sustained by performative practices. Once this idea begins to inform both theoretical and metatheoretical accounts, once we add the performative dimension to our conceptual repertoire and abandon the traditional epistemological frameworks, some fascinating perspectives open up in addressing economies and/as economic knowl- edge. This volume, inspired by the developments in various disciplines, steps into this new terrain and invites the readers to follow.