June 12, 2015
“Quintan Ana Wikswo queers storylines and images. For a society recently focused on how rigidly we should adhere to the identities that are supposed to define us, Quintan Ana Wikswo’s new book of photography and stories comes as a spiritual guide.”
Read the full interview with Alex Teplitsky on Creative Capital’s The Lab
The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far
Alex: Other series you have worked on within your Creative Capital project, Mercy Killing Aktion — Fieldwork/Out Here Death Is No Big Deal, Sonderbauten, and Carrie Buried Beneath Catalpa Beans — are in some part reactions to violence against queer, trans and female bodies. Does this new book incorporate these hidden stories somehow?
Quintan: Artistic, historical, and sociocultural gatekeepers’ reduction of queer lives and queer loves to constricted narrative tropes is a punitive and sadistic erasure. It’s a powerful kind of violence. It’s not the same as a mass grave – but yet it is the same as a mass grave.
Every piece this book has a queer romantic or erotic undertow that invokes the dance of power and vulnerability – a tango that is I think more intentionally and consciously navigated within queerness. Equally importantly, each story is written without defining the gender of at least one of the partners. The gender of the characters and the queerness or straightness of their relationship must be determined within the psyche of the reader, who will encounter a very intentional agency around their own assumptions of love, erotics, sexuality, the heterosexual tropes within queerness, the often obscured queerness of heterosexuality, and the biologies of gender.
At the heart of my book is transformation, transfiguration, and transmogification of self and identity. It invokes people who find within themselves the wherewithal to radically shift beyond the conventional definition of human, or woman, or man, or any living creature. The ability to become a hybrid is more possible every day – we live in an era where it is increasingly feasible to gain agency over our own physical and sexual expression. Transmogrification of self is the ultimate power…a potent alternative to letting the conventions of the day define who we are and how we are seen by ourselves and others. And this book celebrates that.
I must say, this book is a direct rebuttal to three cultural tropes that have long irritated the oyster of me into making some rebellious pearls. One is what let’s call the “reluctance” of publishers to print stories with queer characters – an antediluvian tradition which keeps innumerable gifted artists out of print, and one which in this case at least Coffee House Press comprehensively ignored. The second trope is that queer characters seem required to inhabit all their narrative space only being queer, instead of being, say, a mathematician who is queer but mostly is trapped inside a chamber nautilus under the Hadron Particle Collider. The third trope is that most queer characters in literature – and queer literary love – are forced to extinguish themselves in seemingly fated existential tragedies…most commonly suicides and other symptoms of crimes against humanity that masquerade as cosmically-fated hatred against the self. A kind of existential seppuku or hara-kari. My book offers alternatives to these restricted fates.
I understand the cultural and historical context of these tropes. I carry a lifelong obsession with the writing of Djuna Barnes and Radclyffe Hall and also of the gay pulp books of the early 20th century, almost all of which ended in existential tragedies – most commonly suicides or murders. But again, do we try to simply heal from the trauma of this cultural-historical narrative, or do we – especially artists – do the work of offering maps for radical transformation into unconstrained sexual and gender selfhood? What are the new stories that we need to tell?
There are many of us creating new narratives that place queerness within a rich multiplicity of overlapping contexts – sometimes being a human is more relevant than being queer, and yet being a queer human very deeply informs one’s existence. These concurrent identities have to co-exist in a prismatic complexity that inhabits a bigoted past and a determination for a liberatory future. And simply inserting a one-size-fits-all queer character into an otherwise straight story doesn’t work. Our society’s whole approach to narrative needs to be queered: complicated, intricated, dynamicized, inclusive, discomfiting, and shifting over timespace.