Queering.Earth
Post-normal possibilities.
What is normal?
Who’s normal?
What this is
Queering Earth reads the world through a queering lens — art, literature, poetry, politics, people, and history — and asks what else any of it could have been.
Our sibling site, Star Stuff, is built on science: bone that turns pressure into charge, atoms forged in dying stars, a universe that declines to pathologize its own variation. This place is built on the other half of the shelf — the humanities, the myths, the canon, the stories we were handed and told not to question.
There are no hard facts here for everything. That is deliberate. Interpretation is the method, and the room left open is where the reading happens.
Queering is a verb
The word we are working with comes from Queer Theory, and Nick Walker carried it into neurodiversity. His definition is a parenthesis, and the parenthesis is the whole thing:
I originally conceived of neuroqueer as a verb: neuroqueering as the practice of queering (subverting, defying, disrupting, liberating oneself from) neuronormativity and heteronormativity simultaneously.
Walker is naming two normativities in particular. Taking the verb further out — to a painting, a canon, a century, a diagnosis, a life — is our extension, not his sentence. The credit for the verb stays with him.
The type plays, and the words do not move
Letters on this site lean, deviate, and refuse to sit on the line. That is not decoration. A page about normativity that sets itself in a tidy grid is arguing against itself.
It also is not a trade. Every page here has a plain view — the control at the top of this one. It turns off the play, the motion, and the display faces, and leaves the words exactly as they are. One page, two ways to read it, and no second-class copy. Nothing on this site will ever be readable only in the decorated version.
What grows here
This page, so far. It is the first thing planted.
What follows will be made the way Star Stuff is made — a piece at a time, in public, with the working-out left in, by Helen Edgar and the Stimpunks Foundation. Come back and watch it fill in.