The mundanity of our performance creates radical possibilities of black queer becoming

And yet I can never truly move on. At least not for long. As we are co-constituted beings (Brouwer, et al., Fasset and Ruddick, Pineau, Toyosaki “Communication,” Warren). I am made up of me and you and them and us. As we are interdependent. We are made up of the past, present and future. Our bodies, our memories carrying the memories, carrying the stories of all the people we interact with and all the people who interact with them, and back again. adrienne maree brown asserts, “how we are at the small scale is how we are at the large scale. The patterns of the universe repeat at scale” (52). I tend to start at the small scale. I tend to start with myself. But/and, I believe the small is indicative of the large. Like paperson, my sense of self is always a we, an assemblage, interdependent, connected within, connected beyond an individual sense of self. An interdependent sense of self, a scyborg, “a queer turn of word” that serves to signify the “structural agency of persons” (paperson xiv). And one might resist, on might feel tension, one might be hailed by a colonial or liberal inclination to turn away from our interdependent reality. The inclination I refer to here is the impulse to hold onto independence, from a colonial ontology, as in separate, as in self-sustaining, as in codified (paperson, Sprague, “Ontology”). An inclination that whispers that you are the only one. The large scale, our institutions, they function to keep us here, keep us independent, holding onto this illusion of ownership, of pulling ourselves up from our bootstraps, of the wonderous, idealistic invention of man (Gaztambide and Angod, Hall, “Cultural Studies,” paperson, LeMaster and Mapes, Love, Nicolazzo, Prendergast and Jones, Wilderson, Wynter, Yep “Pedagogy”).

Thus, together, interdependently, we can do something differently. We can do everything differently. And by we, I do mean we. I mean you and I, them and us. And anyone in between. We can consider our bodies, our stories, our communities, as sites of knowing, or as a text to be read or understood or analyzed or situated in relation to (Brouwer et al., LeMaster and Terminel Iberri). Let’s start small. Let’s start every day. Our present moments are indicative of our past moments. Our we is an assemblage, an interdependent sense of self, connected within and connected beyond the individual (paperson). From this vantage point, mundane interactions function as cultural performances or “reiterations of multiple, intersecting cultural ideologies” (LeMaster, “Embracing” 10). Subsequently, mundane performances create possibilities, both, all at once – opportunity to secure the status quo and opportunity to disrupt. The mundane is often characterized by mindlessness, an everyday utterance we don’t think twice about. Critical self-reflexivity functions to disrupt this mindlessness, through purposeful conscious reflection, we can examine our own complicity in hegemony and normativity, in our mundane performances. Writing offers a space for reflection, a pause in the present moment in time. On this page, we deploy our counter-stories as tools of epistemic resistance (Baszile, Smith, Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex”). We write to love ourselves (Anzaldúa). We write to talk back (hooks). We write to research back (Smith). We seek to wrestle with angels (Hall, “Cultural Studies”). Moving with reflexivity we seek to explore the temporal, corporeal, and spatial realities of our bodies, made and unmade by cultural sites of power, the classroom, the academy, and institutions writ large, we seek to survive, and we long to become. And we become through love.