Law is founded on universalizing principles that cement heteronormative ideals as the “truth” of society which precludes the existence of queerness. Their model will always require queer bodies to assimilate to the normalized conditions of society.

Queerness is a generative desiring; it is an evoking of the playful, unpredictable, capacious possibilities of being in bodies, expressing selves, and exploring intimacies.1 In a society of definitive meanings, where identities signify specific and predictable positions, queerness insists on the incompleteness of any one structure of organizing individuals and relationships.2 While the social order is diluted by narratives instructing how relationships form, evolve, and get hierarchized, queer relationalities reject the simplicity of common-sense assumptions; in their place creating a playground of love, care, and dependencies. Against the fantasy of the monogamous couples and their biological families, for example, queer peoples have developed hand-made relational configurations. They intermingle friendships, families, lovers, and partners; they render these categories flexible and allow the individuals to give them meanings based on their unique patterns of connection, communication, and communion.3 Queer peoples have metamorphosed sensuality, from a private act of coupled [*178] intimacy, into what can pervade across social relations and positions.4 Intimacies take shape between individuals who may not know each other s names, and in public spaces where privacy is carved out; sensuality becomes a part of body language between those who may not engage in sexual acts it structures one s disposition and gendered presentation. Intimacies turn into enactments of losing and gaining control, which stretch the definitions and functions of bodies.5 As an invitation to creation, queerness places a fundamental contradiction within the law, which seeks to provide[] the context for ending the story successfully. 6 Whereas the legal order is built upon the premise that a truth is necessary for ordering society, and functions through centralizing that truth, queerness refuses to organize [ ] desire[ ] . . . [even] refusing to speak in a single voice. 7 The tension between the fluid and constructive tendencies of queer worldmaking, against the stabilizing and regulatory matrix of the legal order, offers a beginning point for this article.8 From within this incommensurability, I will pull forth a conversation on the meaning and ideal of equality, particularly as it shapes the relational order of the society implicating how individuals perceive themselves and one another. [*179] The law enshrines and entrenches a unified narrative, a singularized network of meanings, as shared principles of the society. This is an ideal of american citizenship,9 a socialized identity based upon overarching value structures and ethical principles, anticipated to override all particularities.10 Specifically in the context of rights and liberties, the law relies upon the centralized narrative of citizenship.11 To make a claim for equality, a minoritarian group must create an image of themselves employing these normalized conditions of the society. In other words, the group seeking equality must bring themselves in a continuous formation with the dominant narrative of american citizenship what cannot be captured in this linguistic simplification is buried under a political silence; it can only be an excess but it will not be operational in the structuring of reality.12 The construction of identity-based claims with a reliance on the shared values of citizenry represent a fantasy of equality as sameness pretending that [differences] [*180] can be translated with no damage to the structure of meaning underlying the disputes. 13 Under this hegemonic approach to equality, there is a singular truth, the truth of the dominant civil society, and all variances are narrative modifications that can expand, but never undo this truth.14 Even as the introductory remarks show, an understanding of equality that relies upon a singularized narrative cannot sustain the possibilities of existence generated among queer collectivities. Instead, in a queer world order, equality would require allowing difference to produce its own meanings. This is not denouncing the impacts of the social and collective; on the contrary, creation always begins from the vocabulary, grammar, networks, and ideas that populate the social imaginary.15 Yet, rather than taking the particular ordering of these facets as immutable or essentially desirable, queerness recognizes their historical specificity and malleability. In turn, individuals shift away from being passive observers or reproducers of the social order, and take the stance of being willful subjects, those who can claim an agency to shift the forms and concurrently the names given to their bodies, relationships, and the purpose of their lives.16 Queer worldmaking is an act of survival embedded in creation.17 Where the dominant order has shunned away, if not actively violated, the existence of queer peoples,18 finding new names for bodies, coming together in dependent [*181] relationships, and visioning other orders through playing with sensualities is an insistence upon remaining alive, declaring one s worth, and retaining hope for futures of freedom.19 With the centrality of survival to queerness in mind, the unified narrative of the law comes across as inherently violent to those whose being and loving stray away from its demands.20 While liberties may be extended to those priorly denied their rights, the existences which lose their essence when translated into the central narrative will remain at the fringes and continue to be dehumanized.21 Approaching this persistence of inequality is not an unavoidable reality of living in a constitutional polity, but a choice we make in how we think about and organize the law, this article seeks to create a critical inquisition into the centralized relational order, including its forms and specifically its guiding values. In subsequent parts, the article will attempt to tear away the layered, historicized, and cultural assumptions that persist the societal narrative through its tensions with queer desires and dreams, and by unearthing its violent implications on Black communities, and its entrenched roots in colonial dispossession of Native communities. Racialized violence persists across the everyday of the american citizenry.22 Racialized inequality is never separate from the constructions of deviance and abnormality, which most directly bring to mind gendered, sexualized, hence relational variations.23 For [*182] a constructive critique, this paper will tie racialized violence to the encounters and values guiding the nations formation and persistence, in which race has functioned as the baseline historical sign of injury and its reparation, which structures the condition of possibility for modern identities and rights.24 In addition to the analytic and political convergences of queer, Black, and Native histories, just as queer peoples, Black and Native peoples insist on their existence against a social that do not wish for them to survive. They have possessed and have continued to grow their own cultures, their own ways of existing together, which as I will come to argue, transgress the unified fiction upheld by the law. To this end, they offer knowledge, wisdom, and hope to reach beyond the stifling constitutional polity.25 Starting these conversations from a point of relationships is nurturing, because they are personal, as much as always political. We rely upon relationships for sustaining ourselves, building our lives, and reaching towards our dreams. How we come together in intimate relationships and passing connections is the backbone of the society. And where the law can be taken as the story the nation tells of itself, organization of relationships in light of these stories implicate where we think we stand and who we think we can become.26