Like everything we do, this resource is an ongoing process and labor of love. We share our present thinking about queerness here in the hope that it resonates with something in yours.
What’s queerness got to do with collective health and coliberation?
Queerness is more than an orientation, identity or social justice movement. For us, it is potent medicine for collective health and coliberation. ‘Queer’ is one culturally specific name for the nonbinary, relational and inseparable ways of being that allow living systems to thrive. According to some scientists, it’s a basic condition for life itself! When embodied, it’s therefore also an antidote to the binary, individualizing and divisive ways of relating that the anti-life system of colonial modernity imposes, and that are the roots of systemic ecosocial suffering and injustice today. When we live ‘queerly’ in tune with the erotic life force of relation that flows through and connects all beings, we live with/in a world that is wider, wilder, more wondrous and filled with more relations and possibilities than we can imagine within dominant frames of what’s ‘natural’, ‘normal’, necessary and worthy of love. And it desperately needs us to remember how to care.
Entwined with other earth-and-cosmos-based wisdoms and decolonial gestures towards inseparability, queerness attunes us to how heteropatriarchy, cisheteronormativity and mononormativity (all keystones of colonial power) limit our capacities to sense, care for and continue the web of life we belong to. When we tune into life’s queer ways, we can be at home with its wholeness, plurality, complexity, uncertainty and mystery. We are also more sensitive to the violence of systems that reward investments in human supremacy, monoculture, reduction and control. Queering helps us interrupt and heal the delusion of disconnection, systemic unwellness, and colonizing ways of knowing, relating and being. Expanding our understanding of queerness beyond human being and identity is a critical capacity for this work.
Who is this crib sheet for?
A crib sheet is, in US English, a set of succinct notes on important information to remember. This one offers a basic explanation of ‘expansive queerness’ as a medicinal element of collective health and decolonial practice, and highlights some of the ways it grounds and guides our spiritual-political work in Our Bodhi Project, the Spiritual-Social Medicinal Apothecary, and the queer decolonial collective Altared State. You don’t have to identify as queer to find it interesting and we hope it resonates with you, whoever you are and are becoming. It’s for anyone who knows that living into and protecting queer lives and ways of being is an honoring of inseparability, a pathway to collective health and a practice of coliberation. Anyone who is drawn to spiritual-political practice that centers the inseparability of body-land and mind-spirit and love in all forms. Anyone who is caring for people, other living beings, land, communities and futures that are negated and denied by modern/colonial systems. Anyone who is widening their understanding of queerness beyond gender and sexuality to include nonbinary, holistic, relational ways of knowing and being in ecological and metaphysical realms. And, if you move queerly in the world - whether you identify as queer or not - we created this with you especially in our hearts and prayers. The generous wisdoms of your bodies, relations, desires and strategies of love and resilience are centered here.
How is expansive queerness ‘medicinal’?
Queerness is an element of ecosystemic flourishing that circulates through our entangled bodies and lives, whose flow we can also facilitate (or block). It sharpens our capacity to notice, make visible, value and protect the nonbinary, super-diverse ways of being that support collective health and coliberation. ‘Queering’ our sensing, thinking and relating breaks the spell of modern/colonial norms and institutions that devalue, punish and deny the earth’s queer beings and realities.
Here are some lessons we have learned about its medicinal properties in our work for epistemic, social and ecological justice in US, UK, European and South Asian environments.
It replenishes relationality. Queerness is the relational and nonbinary nature of everything. We can be with being both part and whole, in flow and form, ‘both and more and moving.’ We know our survival is entangled with that of other human and nonhuman beings in mysteriously intricate ways that can’t be predicted or controlled as we care for continuance together. Queerness loosens grippy attachments to false securities of separation, hierarchies, centrisms, supremacies, monocultures, reductivism, normalization and binary ‘either/or’ logics.
It puts us in touch with the multiple, multiple and multidimensional essence of reality. By queering dominant definitions of love, family and kin, our understanding of what constitutes a significant relationship expands way beyond what’s offered on modernity’s menu. By queering monological definitions of truth and how we know, we can engage through more knowledges and ways of knowing with/in difference. Our experience of time and space stretches into scales and dimensions that aren’t valued or even intelligible within anthropocentric and (re)productivist institutions, or by divisions between spiritual and political life, or living and dying.
It sharpens our senses to proliferate and complexify possibility. Living queerly makes us more sense-able, able to feel and perceive more of what’s alive and possible in the world. Our sensual minds and thinking bodies become receptive to who and what’s going on beyond what is visible and valued by modern/colonial norms, forms and institutions. Beyond the guttural NO, queerness opens out to ask WHAT ELSE? By holding the whole, queerness helps us sustain fluid relationships that can embrace multiple and sometimes contradictory possibilities and futures with discernment, responsibility and love.
It turns us on and keeps us moving. Living queerly allows us to refuse enervating stories that teach us pleasure is shameful or distracting. It opens channels for vital energy that have been foreclosed. We not only desire but need to cultivate erotic practices, in the widest sense of the word, that bring radical care and risk, play, pleasure, experimentation, joy, ceremony and root healing into our queer selves, families, communities and world-making activities.
It supports stamina for showing up. Nourishing and protecting queer, life-giving ways of knowing, relating and being that are devalued and denied by heteronormative institutions, worldviews and relations is a non-negotiable visceral responsibility. Doing it queerly together deepens love, joy and spiritual-political capacities. Queering is an act of coliberation and a main method for building relational and material infrastructures that support deep dreaming into healthy futures beyond colonized and colonizing models of intimacy, relationship, love and desire.
Who are we, where are we from, and to whom are we accountable?
We belong to lineages and webs of queer, trans and nonbinary ancestors, families, teachers and guides. Their relations, peoples, pains, pleasures, struggles and wisdoms flow through our words. So do our shared and intersectionally different lived experiences of being queer. Sonali Sangeeta Balajee is a US-based queer South Asian femme woman raised by drag queens, HIV/AIDS hospice care and social justice organizing with earth-and-spirit wisdom keepers. She is founder of Our Bodhi Spiritual and Political Organizing Project (Bodhi home) and the Spiritual-Social Medicinal Apothecary (SSoMA). Sarah Amsler is a UK-based nonbinary queer white Anglo person rooted in radical pedagogy and philosophy, spiritual-political somatic poetics, modern/(de)colonial and queer studies, and relational activism. They are a member of Bodhi and tender of the Queer Imagination and Liberation Lab (QuILL), an emerging SSoMA space. Sonali and Sarah, together with Dani d’Emilia and Kate Morales, are also the queer decolonial collective Altared State.
A big part of our commitment to honoring expansive queerness is deepening our understanding of and accountability to the political history of the English term and category ‘queer,’ including its colonizing violence. White US-centric queerness is not intersectional or decolonial. Anthropocentric, heteronormative, mononormative, racist, ableist and extractive capitalist logics permeate queer bodies and communities. Claiming queerness creates hierarchies and excludes when it is reduced to gender, sexual or relational identity within white supremacist modern/colonial capitalist frames that reward identification, hierarchy, competition, productivism and binary in/out belonging. Other histories and modalities of cuir move in Latin America and through quare Black traditions and studies, rooted in different cosmologies, histories of struggle and tensions with white North American and European queer theories, identities and politics. We turn queerly towards these differences and the violence caused by separation within queerness itself, acknowledging our positionally different implications in harm and responsibilities to show up and learn.
