Response 4: <i>Refractions:</i> Moving with Queer Theory into Queer Poethics

On May 21–24, 2023, I found myself indebted to the academic and community-based discussions shared at the University of Huelva conference, “The Knock at the Door: Utopian Dreams for Post-COVID Times,” where I presented draft exegesis content from my forthcoming PhD dissertation, “Refractions: Queer History Cast Through Experimental Poetry” (2024). In “The Theory and Practice of Utopia in Our Troubled Times,” an interview-style discussion between Larissa Lai, Sherryl Vint, and Rocío Carrasco, Lai and Vint compelled me to reflect on how my own PhD poetry collection “Refractions” engages realms of speculative fiction and posthuman imaginaries. As a long-form poetry narrative, my project integrates autofictional memoirs into a fantastical world, where past and future ring dialogically throughout the book in circular time, creating an atemporal space in which multiple characters explore themes of identity, queerness, and kinship.When asked about the literary context, historicity, and ongoing utility of a term like speculative fiction, Lai suggests that “the speculative still makes that gesture toward the future,” and Vint offers that literary “developments are shifting our understanding of what the genre can do, of what kinds of stories it can tell, and of what kinds of cultural histories are brought to it.”1 “Refractions” features the posthuman being Thousand, a mnemonic being who emerges between my husband and myself—we first met in “two thousand two”—who suddenly appears in “Refractions” as the nonbiological child of queer love, though unbeknownst to us when they first appear. Thousand is born into a future world of Calgary, Alberta, Canada, without parents or family nearby, with no context for understanding their environment, specific location, or queer parentage. It is only through their gradual interactions with others that Thousand becomes propelled to seek their parents, lineage, and a broader kinship network of chosen family. As such, my project attempts to navigate what José Esteban Muñoz necessitates for queerness in Cruising Utopia, stating “here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there” (Muñoz 2009, 1). Cautiously, I problematized Muñoz’s mode of framing during my own conference presentation, where the “prison house” invocation privileges metaphor over institutionalized power structures of oppression and violence. And yet “Refractions” remains indebted to the capaciousness of queer utopianism. I am particularly drawn to Muñoz’s approach to utopian “hope,” where Thousand might also be able to find where they come from and discover their own innate agency to explore the trajectory of an indeterminate—and queerly undefined—future.As a posthuman being, Thousand’s search reaches forward (for family and kin), backwards (for origin stories), and through atemporal modes of discovery (engaging queer archives), where they witness autofictional memory reels that belong to family and non-biological relatives, visually animated within a glass structure. Vint further contextualizes utopian hope as theorized by Ernst Bloch—from which Muñoz also reimagines navigational space—describing “the utopian possibilities in everyday life that we can activate . . . [where] hope is materially real . . . [as well as] previous utopian movements [that are] perhaps unfinished thanks to repression, displacement, dismissal—but which remain out there.” Mindful of this, Lai and Vint inspired me at the conference to reconsider how a then and there may be internalized, conceptualized, then (re)positioned to project queer and communal relationality. Following “The Knock at the Door,” I have found it useful to further consider how queer directionality might also operate through the lens of Joan Retallack’s “The Poethical Wager” (2004).Retallack suggests “thickening poetics with an h” (Retallack 2004, 33), to feel the ethical insertion as a decidedly fixed presence when negotiating the act of writing, its power, poignancy, and signifiers, and how one brings accountability to engagements with language. Retallack reflects that “we get into those typically postmodern conundrums of the ‘prison house of language’ or the ‘prison house of power relations’” (23), and suggests we reconsider—in writing, in representation—“the way we think about history and aesthetics” (27). Where Muñoz inspires my horizon-bound directionality in “Refractions,” Retallack calls me further into an ethical framework of self-reflexive responsibility and accountability.“The Poethical Wager” asks too that we reconsider how “space-time [should] be understood as fractal surface . . . [where] dynamic equilibrium can replace the double-ended arrow of depth and transcendence . . . [and] the way we think about history and aesthetics” (Retallack 2004, 27). Retallack positions this as an ongoing “wager”—indeed, Retallack’s own essay mimics an interview with “Quinta Slef” [sic], a metaphorical split-version of her own self—and she challenges the author to wager on a writing approach that balances cultural and historical contexts with the willingness to still take risks. Retallack explains that to “speak of poethics is to foreground this whole range of reassurances and dissonances, as values and epistemologies, embedded in writing/reading as [a] way of living in the world” (37–38). In my own work, I embrace this by bringing Thousand into the space of the queer archive, where authorial (and communal) memoirs bring seemingly disparate themes, memories, and narrative content into close proximity with one another.As a kind of pseudo-posthuman being, Thousand occupies a queerly-generative space that recognizes past experiences (and not personal memories) waiting in situ, conjuring what Lai considers as a type of “future [that] can only come out of the past, [where] we have many pasts to access.” I do this not only to acknowledge what Retallack defines as “the mess . . . [or] the world beyond the page” (2004, 38), but to situate myself as merely one person in a much broader, community-oriented conversation. One such example includes my poem “Mythopoeia” (Meunier 2024, 89–92), which brings the frame of familial and cultural relations into a space of tension and ever-changing dynamics, where stark contrasts like a distant relative’s suicide and the late-life discovery of a birth grandmother are juxtaposed with settler identity and colonialism. These tensions are offset by the balance of queer love in a confluence of mixed emotional landscapes, where reliance on the “origins” we come from make danger when attempting to define who we are, yet ultimately,in this family we make ofthe confluenceshapes ourbecoming. (“Mythopoeia,” Meunier 2024, 4–7, 92)Lai states that “you can’t be in relation with others unless you have an understanding of who you are yourself, even if that understanding is constantly moving and shifting.” I place “Refractions” firmly in community, within the relational, and I invite readers to consider how they too are a part of this evolving definition. It is a counterbalance I offer to avoid tendencies in the “relentlessly self-obsessed narrative” (Retallack 2004, 33), and as I work through directional, ethical, and narratological conduits, I attempt to bring my own sense of utopian hope into a space imbued with an ever-increasingly queered sense of poethics.One of the primary ways my poetry explores this is by creating patterns of circularity—across poems, throughout the book—to create feedback loops of cross-connectivity, organized around themes of chosen family. The poetry book’s name, “Refractions,” provides a metaphor for divided and independent light (or narrative) streams, while simultaneously invoking the concept of light, for all its consolidated waves, as a collective and omnipresent whole. In physics and the science of light, there is no simple opposite to refraction, since refracted light waves require a surface—a lens—to converge light into a concentrated beam (Mortimer 1998–2022). In “Refractions” social relations are invoked through the “convergence” of disparate stories that gradually become interconnected within the collection’s macrostructure. Poems share themes, repeat content, and rescramble source material, offering a poetic response to represent the strength and tenderness of chosen family, kinship, and those in our lives who create and provide foundations for family:“Refractions” brings Thousand through multiplying navigations of self-discovery and personhood, loss, trauma, and healing—regardless of the blood relations and kinship networks that define us. Ultimately, the family forged expands not only beyond blood but beyond life itself, as Thousand traverses through liminal time and space, drawing our loved ones—dead and alive—back into their light.Muñoz centers the project of queer identity—and the concept of queer utopia—in a search for futurity that is channeled through action-oriented movement and seeking, especially in the way queer aesthetics map social relations. He suggests that the queer aesthetic “frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity” (2009, 1), but as my project casts Thousand through refracting narrative waves, Thousand is also decentered to avoid positioning them as the pseudo-human/posthuman being who might otherwise absorb community-generated narratives. In this way, my project works to bring this queerly-emergent being into a space of personal experience and subjectivity, relationality, and listening to the stories of others who bear witness. I have rendered Thousand carefully to avoid what Vint refers to as “‘the human’. . . always with that definite article,” while considering how such ideas can also be internalized as Thousand comes into their own, subjective understanding of innate queerness.In “Refractions” Thousand emerges organically as a being born of queer love, yet my poetry does not aim to oversignify children or progeny in the provenance of homosexual relations. Thousand’s queer(ed) navigation is not one dedicated to gender or sexual identity exploration, yet my project works to bring Thousand into conversation with their innate queerness while resisting societal pressures for a reductive identity. In this way, Thousand not only represents a site for queer defiance but they also move through a space of artivist poetry (Colavito and Raj 2022), resisting linear and reductive modes of queer identity and narrative interpretation. As a composite of queer parents, chosen family, and kinship networks, I position Thousand as a character who defies symbolic homogenization, while taking caution to avoid the extractivism implied by rendering a “composite” character. In consideration of posthuman feminist work by Rosi Braidotti, Lai identifies “[t]hose parts of our being, and those beings among us that can’t be covered by the paradoxes of representation that adhere to the discourse of rights, and fall outside of it, [which] are precisely those sites where we are being both exploited and remade anew.” I respond to such politics by rendering Thousand as a being who resists queer reductivism—even fetishization—through their phenomenological development.Thousand’s identity is not signified by pronouns or other vectors of gender and sexual identity, but they do work persistently through explorations of innate queerness, holding metonymic space for queer parentage. A passage like Thousand’s physical “(queer features) / how they pollinate / the particles I hide” (“Anemone Patens (present),” 28–30, 31) does not aim to invoke the historically problematic “nature versus nurture” debate, but as a being born of connectivity and not of sex, Thousand is a character who carries their non-biological parentage with them through ways that extend beyond physiological boundedness.For Thousand, selfhood or personhood is kinetic and animated, rather than fixed in the static object of a definable noun. As a character they are born out of phonemes (“two thousand two”), into sound, articulations, and then into smoothing, semiotic flow. The first sign of Thousand’s emergence appears in the poem “Anemone Patens (past),” where “I__M / I__M / I _M” (23–25, 10) implies the phonetic demand of recognition through a gramogrammatic soundscape: I am I am I am. Gramograms are a constraint-based form of writing that can be described as letter-by-letter sound poems read in sequential order, rather than grammatical spelling. Thousand learns to expand their language slowly, through interactions with other humans, and the later poem “Thousanding” revisits the notion that, poetically, Thousand is born a verb. They are a being inclined to movement and fluidity—an action-oriented state—and Thousand’s self-awareness continues to expand as they question: “[a]re all verbs queer / all verbs are queer / when verbs are queer” (Meunier 2024 [“Thousanding,” 1–3], 43). Agency and choice are implied here in the simplicity of the word “when.”It is an affirmation of the kinetic movement inherent to a developing and queer self, even if Thousand never refers to themselves in such a way. As the verb “to be” is broken from the gramogrammatic, single-letter stasis of restriction and sound, Thousand learns to burst forward, verbed and queer, “[t]o be. Thousand, then / to verb the moon, this / new growth in my nail bed” (Meunier 2024 [“Thousanding,” 2–4], 44). Later, Thousand poses the question of “[w]ho took my Atlas / for queerness” (Meunier 2024 [“High in the Altitude of Fetish” 1–2], 56), and this allusion invokes the image of holding up the weight of queer identity as a commodifiable object. In this way, Thousand takes shape as a figure who resists queer fetishization, or perhaps resists the notion of queerness as a reductive, definable noun.In a lecture on posthuman feminism delivered at Columbia University in 2016, Braidotti reflects on the language of post-ness by suggesting “the topic is embarrassing . . . one cringes with embarrassment. Not another post, we have had them all” (Braidotti 2016, 5:40–5:48). Braidotti provides the entry point for theoretical exploration in her claim that the posthuman “is a navigational tool, in Deleuze’s terms a ‘conceptual persona,’ [and] in my own words a ‘cartography’” (6:24–6:32). She reveals a set of tension points between the rejection of humanist prejudices, violences, and harms, yet remains paradoxically at odds with the conflict inherent to antihumanist negativity and nihilism—an echo of Muñoz in the way he similarly takes up the position of exploring resistance to groundbreaking work in Queer Theory that recalibrates counter-hegemonic politics in the antirelational (see Bersani 1996; Edelman 2004). Yet Vint brings ideas forward that are central to my work with Thousand, stating in the interview in this volume that “for me, the post is really post to the ideology or philosophy of humanism,” where “being a being who is different from what we have called ‘the human’ is a priority for me.” I hear similar calls for relationship, accountability, and reciprocity in Lai’s reference to earlier communities of writers “trying to figure out good ways to be with one another across vast power imbalances and differences in embodied experience.” For me, Thousand represents communally situated, relational and cross-connecting movements.Muñoz, Retallack, and Braidotti each direct me through a compelling framework that centers my project in one of queer navigation and artivism. However, this search is not singular or one-directional—it is proximal, relational, and community-focused. I share “Refractions” as a project that represents my own way of rendering and activating a Queer Poethics. In “Refractions” queer identity representations are not reductive or monolithic, textual signifiers are not in service to queer polyvocality, and I hold myself accountable to the many ways of queer writing, speaking, and being within acts of representation. Muñoz, Retallack, and Braidotti offer me a new lens to consider how Queer Poethics might operate, and flow into my own mode of artivism. Inspired by the ways Vint and Lai refocus utopianism in relational accountabilities, I invite myself, my family, and my readers to journey with Thousand in this fractal of overlapping, kaleidoscopic, queerly-defiant space—to feel how Queer Poethics can thicken, speak, and share—and to expand the evolving language we form within community.

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