Interrogating queer relationalities gives us ways to understand epistemic injustice and cultural intelligibility which provides important insight to how we interact with each other on both a micro and macro scale. Yep et al 22

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.

Queer relationality is a complex constellation of phenomena arising from individual and collective responses to cultural practices, symbolic and material systems, and social structures associated with heteropatriarchy in a particular historical and geopolitical context. Offering a preliminary conceptualization to encourage further exploration without foreclosing its unseen possibilities, Yep (2017) proposed that queer relationality encompasses multiple domains, including:

Modes of recognition and ways of seeing (e.g., knowing that another person might be sexually non-normative).

Systems of intelligibility and frameworks of interpretation(e.g.,recogniz- ing actions and expressions as queer).

Cultural expressions and linguistic utterances (e.g., using the expression “we are family” to affirm queerness in a group).

Affective articulations and emotive interactions (e.g.,expressions of subtle tenderness between two men in public).

Encrypted sociality and coded relations (e.g., a knowing glance of acknowledgment between sexually non-normative subjects).

Embodied relations and somatic connections (e.g.,a subtle intimate touch between strangers).

Forms of belonging and affinity patterns (e.g., queer support networks).

Community formations and collective arrangements (e.g., a family of “choice,” consisting of friends, ex-partners, neighbors, etc.).

Collective histories of oppression and memories of marginalization and suffering (e.g., group experiences of disenfranchisement and pain).

Although these domains circulate outside of the intelligible world of hetero- normativity, they are frequently in relation to it. These domains are improvi- sational, creative, and adaptive as sexual and gender minoritarian subjects navigate a social world that was not designed for them. Further, queer rela- tionality entails two spheres—intimacy and desire. Intimacy, ranging from fleeting and temporary to enduring and lasting, involves

● Feelings of closeness and connection. ● Deep knowing and understanding. ● Mutual attunement. ● Sensuality and eroticism.

Desire, ranging from internally experienced to externally articulated, includes

● Wishes and aspirations. ● Longings. ● Needs and wants. ● Affinities and attractions. ● Yearnings.

Taken together, this initial conceptualization of queer relationality opens up a vast landscape of social phenomena for recognition, exploration, and under- standing that have been erased, neglected, ignored, or deemed unimportant in the mainstream cultural imagination. To put it another way, queer relation- ality, challenging epistemic injustice for minoritarian subjects, attempts to make these subjects’ lives recognizable and valid, in Foucault’s, 1990) words, by “the grid of intelligibility of the social order” (p. 93).

Cultural intelligibility, according to Butler (1999), refers to the production of a normative framework that establishes and authenticates who can be recognized and regarded as a legitimate subject in a particular society. A legitimate subject is one who is visible, one whose subjectivity is deemed as “proper” and “real” according to normative cultural logics, and one whose life is understood as both recognizable and valuable in a culture. A legitimate subject has a life that matters and lives a life that is considered a life (Butler, 2009). A normative framework that produces such a legitimate subject is the “heterosexual matrix” (Butler, 1999, p. 9). In this framework, a sequence of idealized relations between sex, gender, and desire is generated to produce cultural intelligibility and proper personhood. By positing that desire follows naturally from gender and gender follows naturally from sex, heterosexuality is constructed and continuously reified to appear “normal” and “natural” in social relations. More specifically, the heterosexual matrix presents sex as a natural substance that finds gender expression through femininity (for women) and masculinity (for men) in automatic binary fashion where femi- ninity is expressed in sexual desire for her “opposite” (a man) and masculinity is manifested in desire for his “opposite” (a woman). Through heteronorma- tivity, or the normalization of heterosexuality, the matrix creates, maintains, and perpetuates certain subjects as legitimate and coherent (Butler, 1999; Yep, 2003). A heterosexual woman or man has social, legal, and political validity and power (Butler, 1999). Society and culture are built for them.

The production of legitimate subjects simultaneously creates individuals and groups that are deemed unrecognizable and unintelligible in a culture. A lesbian, whose sex, gender, and desire line up differently from the hetero- sexual matrix by sexually desiring another woman, might be viewed as “unna- tural” and not a “proper” woman in a number of cultural contexts. Similarly, a transwoman, whose gender performance troubles the heterosexual matrix by calling into question, at the very least, the relation between sex and gender, is not a viable subject—that is, recognizable and “real”—in various social institu- tions, systems of representation, and social structures. Cram’s (2012) analysis of the murder of Angie Zapata, a working-class transwoman of color, who identified as “all woman” but had not completed her bureaucratic name change, is a tragic example of cultural unintelligibility (p. 412). In the trial that ensued after Zapata was violently killed, the defense deployed the “decep- tion” trope to suggest that Angie was responsible for her own death. Cram notes that “in the eyes of the law, Angie did not exist” (p. 414, our italics). By enforcing the “normative notion of what the body of a human must be,” Angie and other sexual and gender minoritarian subjects, become unreal in the cultural imagination (Butler, 2004, p. 33). Through the process of derealiza- tion, Butler adds

[C]ertain lives are not considered lives at all, they cannot be humanized, that they fit no dominant frame for the human, and that this level then gives rise to a physical violence that in some sense delivers the message of dehumanization that is already at work in the culture. (2004, p. 34)

Unintelligible subjects are abject, unnatural, less than human, and not fully human (Butler, 1999). As such, they do not have social, legal, and political validity and legitimacy.

Queer relationality challenges the dehumanization and derealization of these subjects by making their lives, practices, and connections intelligible in the mainstream cultural imagination through the identification of normative violence and the development of alternative domains of cultural intelligibility. Normative violence, according to Butler (1999), refers to the power mechan- isms through which certain bodies become devalued—dehumanized and derealized—by certain types of cultural norms and ideals (e.g., gender, race, sexuality). By identifying these norms and recognizing their violence in endor- sing and determining what—and who—counts as culturally intelligible, a critical awareness can be developed to create the possibilities for cultural change.

To broaden domains of cultural intelligibility beyond heteronormative relations and social arrangements, different ways of relating, engaging, and connecting must be registered and examined by attending to the experiences and perspectives of minoritarian subjects. In short, it calls for exploring, embodying, and envisioning diverse queer relationalities.