Feeling Fear,Feeling Queer: The Peril and Potential of Queer Terror

We Need to Put an End to This

What happened in Orlando is not new, because we, people of color, have a history in the US of never mattering, we have a history of enslavement, we have a history of exploitation, we have a history of criminalization, we have a history of violence and that is what happened today. This attack was years in the making and based off of hundreds and hundreds of years of oppression and violence targeted towards queer and trans people of color. The media will use labels like “terrorism” and other things to get us away from understanding how our culture and institutions like the media, like education, like prisons, have actually been complicit in this attack, and are complicit in the ways that our bodies are put at risk every single day both inside of our homes and out in public space, such as the streets. We as queer and trans Latinx people need to see what happened in Orlando as a reminder that our human dignity, our lives, are connected to the liberation of Black people, Muslim people, of women, of trans people, and so we cannot move forward without working with these communities to end white supremacy, patriarchy, and that when we say “Latinx” we mean and it includes Asian folks, Black people, Muslims, Native Americans, and so for us, we’re one culture but with very diverse experiences. We need to put an end to this because it’s not one specific group that is to blame. It is the system that has created this violence, since colonization started over 500 years ago. ¹

Terrorism, “The unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims,” ² and hate crimes are both on the rise in the United States and globally. With 49 killed and 53 wounded, the massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando on June 12, 2016, was the deadliest mass shooting by a single shooter, the deadliest incident of violence against LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) people in U.S. history, and the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since the September 11 attacks in 2001. ³

On July 22, presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton visited the site of the attack and rightly acknowledged, “It’s still dangerous to be LGBT in America” calling the massacre a “targeted attack on the Latino LGBT community.” ⁴ Clinton also acknowledged that members of the LGBT community “are more likely than any other group in our country to be the targets of hate crimes,” ⁵ and people of color still constitute a majority of those numbers—a fact which should build ally solidarity between queer and people of color activist movements. But single-issue media coverage seems incapable of bringing intersectional attention to the racist and anti-trans*/queer violence that Orlando represents. Following the shooting, most of the coverage was about Omar Mateen and his motivations, his history, his orientations, and his thoughts and feelings. He was quickly proven to have no formal links with The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) or other terrorist organizations, yet the coverage continued to focus on him and the specter of terrorism, rather than the victims as minoritarian subjects, on homophobic and transphobic violence, or on gun violence in the United States more generally.

Thus, while gains certainly continue to be made, queer rights (like all other minoritarian gains) seem to bring on more hatred, fear, and vitriol from certain corners of majoritarian culture. ⁶ We, like the trans* people of color quoted above, believe that all our futures, “our human dignity, our lives, are connected to the liberation of Black people, Muslim people, of women, of trans people, and so we cannot move forward without working with these communities to end White Supremacy [and] patriarchy.” ⁷ Efforts to secure these rights, dignities, and futures must be fought intersectionally from both minoritarian and ally subjectivities.

José Esteban Muñoz writes about depression or what he calls “the depressive position” as an affect/ive position. ⁸ He draws on a mediascape ⁹ that can “mimetically render” various subject positions (not just depression) and in so doing begin to affectively construct a “contemporary citizen subject” who does not conform to the universalism of the normative white subject. ¹⁰ Like Muñoz, we are trying to “resist the pull” of universalism and bear witness to the knowledge that all we do represents the intersectionality of race, gender (not only gender diversity but also violence against women), and sexual violence. We are all implicated by our diverse performances of our minoritarian and majoritarian subject positions, including through and about the massacre in Orlando.

Kathleen Stewart and Sandra Harding pinpoint the historicity of “apocalypsis” both individual and collective, tied always to “race and racism, colonialism and terror, religion, (ir)rationality and (anti)modernity, politics and rebellion, economics, inequality, justice, and complicity.” ¹¹ Our moment, less than 20 years after both Muñoz’s and Stewart and Harding’s writing, is not the same. Our moment, some might say, is one concerned with affect and emotions specifically because the acceleration of dehumanization in so many diverse aspects of our lives is becoming so complete. Syncing, scaling, commodifying—this is not the language of affect and emotion, rather it is increasingly the language of the media, of politicians, and of the academy.

Orlando is an example of both a kind of terrorism and also a hate crime, but in what ways, and what do the two have to do with one another? In this essay we consider what we are calling queer terror, an affective condition not limited to LGBT or other minoritarian subjects, and its relationship to fear, hate and factionalism (or isolationism). That is, queer terror is both terror against queer subjects and a queering of terror culture itself. We use the notion of queer terror to critically reject the position that we are now singularly and collectively living in an age of gay assimilation, unprecedented visibility, and increasing political and representational power.

Two Prohibitions

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First, Orlando as an affective outcome of an instance of queer terror reinforces the pervasive prohibition against gathering. Gathering is an increasingly suspect activity which often has radical and life-taking consequences: it is no longer safe to gather. But people of color and other minoritarians (including queers) have been dogged by this prohibition for centuries. Gathering together is now, importantly, entering the majoritarian culture as a borderless prohibition. The possible repercussions against gathering administered by either the state or by madmen are always felt now, if not consciously spoken aloud. The prohibition against gathering in public—creating publics, as it were—is a further contributor to the isolationism, fear, hatred, and paranoia mentioned above. It is a contributor to queer terror, a notion we unpack in this essay. Terror is, ultimately, a queering of public (or counterpublic) gathering, and thus implicates both minoritarian and majoritarian subjects in its wake.

Second, Orlando as an affective subject position reinforces the danger of feeling, doing—or performing—and, ultimately, being queer (LGBT). One reason activists continue to implore a rapidly forgetting public to #SayTheirNames is because queer lives have for so long been erased by state-sanctioned violence. Unlike the #BlackLivesMatter movement, which stresses the need to recognize that collectively Black lives continue to be systematically taken and devalued, #SayTheirNames is a reminder of the individuality of lost minoritarian lives. Rhetorically positioning victims of state-sanctioned violence individually and collectively produces very different affective and representational results in majoritarian and minoritarian culture. One of the things that Orlando’s tragedy makes possible is the notion that queer terror produces fear, hatred, and trauma in both individual and collective minoritarian publics, though that queer terror is a feeling, doing, and being experienced differently in “different circuits of belonging.” ¹²

To understand the particularity and the universality of queer terror, we call on Muñoz’s “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the Depressive Position” ¹³ and Stewart and Harding’s “Bad Endings: American Apocalypsis,” ¹⁴ essays that explicitly and implicitly address the interrelationship of the prohibition against gather and against being queer embodied within minoritarian queer communities and communities of color as ways of attending. For Muñoz, attending happens in the notion of depressive associations with being brown, and for Stewart and Harding it is to be found in apocalypsis.

Feeling Fear, Feeling Queer, or the “Problem of Belonging in Alterity”

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Muñoz tells us that “the topic of depression has not often been discussed in relation to the question of racial formations in critical theory” and makes a case for what he calls “the depressive position and its connection to minoritarian aesthetic and political practice.” ¹⁵ The particular depressive position he looks at is aligned with “being brown,” and the relationship between “brown feelings,” an ethics of the self that utilized and deployed by people of color and other minoritarian subjects who don’t feel quite right within normative protocols of affect and comportment. ¹⁶ What Muñoz calls “brown feelings” we are here calling “queer feelings,” an ethics of the selves who don’t feel “quite right” in our queerness, in spite of/in the presence of our whiteness, as queer subjects searching for “affective particularity” and belonging in an age of terror. We make this move in concert with Muñoz’s “weak theorizing” by engaging queer and critical theory as a mode to “know and experience the other who shares a particular affective [and] emotional valence” with us. ¹⁷

Muñoz looks to subjects and particularities “both shared and divergent,” rather than identities and identity politics, when pushing Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s still-resonant question, “Can the subaltern speak?” to ask further, “what does the subaltern feel” and do, in the performative sense, when dis/located? ¹⁸ That is, the many and accelerating acts of terror that populate our mediascapes today are no more a cohesive whole than those who are targeted by its systematic randomness. The victims at Pulse were not all queer, and not all Latino. The murders of 49 people and the injury of 53 others may not even have been a homophobic hate crime (as the Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI] continues to point out), but this does not mean that what happened there was not an act of queer terror—quite the opposite. In an age of terror, allyship does not pivot on solidarity and recognition alone; it can also pivot on the understanding that no one is safe, and the affective community created in and though the feelings, actions and affective particularities of gathering together and being queer.

Equally, today’s disparate disenfranchised, the marauding marginalized, are not always the subaltern that meets the eye. We know that “terrorists” are not, as the media and FBI would have us believe, easily categorizable as Muslim, Eastern, racially, ethnically or religiously other; indeed, more often than not they are “insiders.” Nonetheless, in response, the state machine offers up these “terrorist others” as justifications for committing yet more acts of terror, both institutional (against nation-states and foreign civilians) and individual (#BlackLivesMatter) acts of terror which largely go unnamed and unpunished in the global community.

And so an affective circuit of terror thrives in the acceleration of deferred retribution. The murdered and murderers become a homogeneous whole, despite citizen’s groups who implore us to remember, to #SayTheirNames, to go out, and to resiliently feel things such as hope, unity, and love—though here not love in the romantic sense but instead as a “striving for belonging” that doesn’t ignore the seemingly insurmountable obstacles to even “the most provisional” sense of being a part. ¹⁹

Still, the terror-affect grows and morphs like a contagion. Only 10 years after Muñoz articulated “Feeling brown, feeling down,” as a “racially attentive” politics “not invested in the narrative of a whole and well-adjusted subject,” ²⁰ our recognition of “feeling fear, feeling queer” proliferates beyond the boundaries and borders of ethnic, sexual, or gendered communities. It is, as Muñoz has it, a “position we live in” ²¹ both in the world and in our understandings of ourselves.

Another way of considering depressive/liberatory and collective/individualist approaches to subaltern feelings and doings is articulated in Stewart and Harding’s apocalyptic/millennial sensibility—a mode of attention, of knowing, and voice—[that] has come to inhabit and structure modern American life.” ²² Stewart and Harding ²³ suggest that “apocalypticism and millennialism are the dark and light sides of a historical sensibility transfixed by the possibility of imminent catastrophe, cosmic redemption, spiritual transformation, and a new world order.” Orlando exemplifies both light and dark in this historical moment; the massacre embodies our terror, our solidarity with/as allies, and our yearning for all four possibilities. As such, it is more than mere fact or generalizable example of individual or collective acts of terror and violence. Rather, Orlando instantiates states of unease—not quite rightness—and feelings of terror, or what we might call being or becoming in (times of) terror. In such apocalyptic times, Orlando is not an example of the kind of terror that has long threatened racially and queerly attuned and subaltern communities of people in relation to a normalizing social sphere. Instead, Orlando becomes evidence of a nation threatened with destruction by “illegal immigration, race wars” ²⁴ and Terrorism with a capital T. In focusing on just how and where and who was subject to that terror and our collective responses to those historical, institutional, and relational violences, we affectively decenter—or queer—terror.

Is There “Emancipatory Potential” in Queer Terror?

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Muñoz asks us to notice how different “circuits of belonging connect,” ²⁶ and how we, as minoritarian subjects perform, function and feel things within a majoritarian sphere. Muñoz draws from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick ²⁷ in noticing how

[P]aranoia has become a standardized posture taken in queer critique and that it thus has become routine rather than critical thinking. The paranoid move is always about a certain hermeneutic unveiling of an external threat. Such a move becomes routine, or numb repetition, and renders the paranoid subject unable to participate in what [Hortense] Spillers would call the intramural protocol of a displaceable self-attentiveness. ²⁸

If Muñoz’s theoretic of “feeling brown” is a lever for shifting identificatory constructions of race and ethnicity to the “feeling” and “doing” of them, then in this lever, we have some opportunities for “doing” or “feeling queer” differently as well. In “feeling queer,” racialized subjects intersect with religious, gendered and sexualized minoritarian subjects to “do” minoritarianism differently. In this worlding, the victims of the Orlando massacre were “feeling” and “doing” queer in that club—whether they were homosexual or gender nonconforming or neither. And this is perhaps one axis upon which majoritarian others are/were able to enter into this massacre as a tragedy. That is, not only did people line up to donate blood or fly in from other places to offer healing attention because they saw that these victims could have been their daughters, sons, brothers, and so on, but also because they saw that allies could be equally punished for their affiliation with queer life, not only those who identify as queer. As such, queer can be an affective relationality (a queer feeling and performative doing), not only or simply a relationality grounded in identity or identity politics. ²⁹

So if “feeling queer” is an “affective particularity” of a collectively performed and understood time and place, then those lying on the bathroom floor in the Pulse nightclub were subject to queer terror, as were the law enforcement responders, the family and friends with whom the victims did or did not speak before they died, the ones who escaped the club, the family and friends of the murderer, and all those implicated by homophobic, Islamophobic, and/or gender violence. There is no one experience of queer affect in response to this event, because affect is a particularity based on difference and instability. That is, the affect of the event is queer not only because it destabilized life for those touched and silenced by it, but because it is nonnormative and because it is aligned with queerness as a feeling and a doing, albeit one “not yet here.” ³⁰

If we respond to Muñoz’s call to become more attentive to particularities, “both shared and divergent,” we can find in the Orlando massacre a kind of community, one that is “negotiated through a particular affective circuit,” ³¹ even if and when the affect/s of that circuit are shared and divergent forms of terror. Queer terror. Does Orlando then become an event that demonstrates again the abjection of queerness as a minoritarian subject position, in a cultural moment which demands we agree on the “normalization” of queer? Or can the event itself be seen as a further “assimilation” of queerness, in its egalitarianism in making us all equally victims of terror: queer or not, brown or not, gathered or isolated, ally or enemy?

Affectively Queer Counterpublics

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Muñoz and others including Berlant, ³² Warner, ³³ Harris, ³⁴ Halberstam, ³⁵ and Dimitriadis ³⁶ have posited the notion of counterpublics as a way of navigating particularities that might move beyond the individual. Counterpublics are more than alternative publics, however, as Nancy Fraser has shown, and they are inextricably linked with the practices and perspectives of subjugated and minoritarian subjects who “ . . . have repeatedly found it advantageous to constitute alternative publics.” ³⁷

Can the clubgoers hiding in a bathroom at Pulse nightclub in Orlando that night be considered a minoritarian affective counterpublic? And if so, who exactly constitutes that counterpublic? Is it Latino minoritarians, lesbian minoritarians, LGBT minoritarians? What about nonqueer others who were in or involved with those in the club that night? What about Mateen himself? Muñoz reminds us, “One of queer theory’s major contributions to the critical discourse on identification is the important work that has been done on cross-identification” and “queer chains of connection . . .” ³⁸ Intersectionality is alive and well across minoritarian discourses, practices, and scholarship, as it was that night in Pulse. If nonqueers can not only articulate but also perform (including dying for) their allyship, that allyship becomes an ontoepistemological extension of performing minoritarian subjectivities in the way that Muñoz imagined—counterpublics of allyship, as well as queerness and brownness, become an intersectional prism through which individual and collective performances coalesce and diverge.

Those who danced and those who lost their lives at Pulse that night all experienced queer terror in affectively relational ways, whether they identified as queer or not. The attack in Orlando binds us together in a “minoritarian public sphere” ³⁹ of queer terror, regardless of gender and sexual orientations or cultural affiliations. Queer terror becomes an emergent affective experience that touches all of us in relation to the Orlando massacre—whether there or not, dead or alive, Latinx or non-, gay or straight, trans* or cis*. Queer terror becomes, through the act and its viral media representations, a minoritarian public sphere that can be shared by queer people of color (QPOC) and allies alike. However, we recognize the potential danger of nonqueers and non-QPOC, through their coconstituting of this queer terror, believing they “feel the same,” just as those of us who are #BlackLivesMatter allies might risk believing we feel the same as people of color because we experience our own minoritarian terror. While we can share the affect of queer terror and minoritarian counterpublics as a doing, we recognize and respect that we cannot share the experience of being that minoritarian subject, only the “flickers of recognition” that pass between such subjects. ⁴⁰

Queer Allies and Terror

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Immediately following the attack, acts of ally solidarity, including the efforts of those who organized blood drives, established grief counseling centers and created fund-raisers including a Go Fund Me campaign that raised around US$20 million for victims, first responders and their families, flourished. A heated, sometimes vitriolic conversation about just who the victims of the massacre were and how they should be identified—and thus included or excluded from belonging to the community of those who were murdered harmed in the Pulse shooting—as well as who could or should be an ally, also proliferated. An article in The Advocate, “There Were Straight Victims in Orlando Too,” ⁴² mourns the loss of “friends and allies of LGBT folks” in the Pulse shooting, though lists the name of only one nongay victim (despite mainstream media identifying several female victims as not gay). No trans* victims were named in media accounts of Orlando, though as trans* and queer Latinos who created the “Latinx” manifesto quoted in the opening of this essay point out, this attack is, tragically, one atrocity in a long history of violence against an ever-expanding minoritarian community that includes not only queer and trans POC, but also “Asian folks, Black people, Muslims, Native Americans.” ⁴³ One Advocate reader comments,

The article is simply about honoring the lives of our allies as allies. Doing so in no way trivializes the homophobic motive behind these murders. They were killed not because of who they were but essentially because of what they believed, which is no less horrific. We would not be where we are as a community without the love, support and activism of our allies. They should be cherished and should be mourned in the same way and for the same reasons we mourn for all the others who were killed. ⁴⁴

Others voiced the opinion that LGBT folks should “get over it” because they’re not the only people who suffer, countered by LGBT folks saying “don’t diminish my pain—you wouldn’t say that to Black folks.”

More than a year later we are still, affectively, spectators of Orlando as an event that is not, now, here. Even those who survived have moved temporally beyond “being there” and their experiences diverge from those who perished. So what does it mean to “ally” ourselves to an event, to that event? Does it mean saying the names of those who have died, striving to remember their lost narratives, feelings, affects, and living embodiments, just as we do for generations of previous victims of anti-queer, anti-Black, anti-woman, anti-minoritarian violence? Does it mean that we feel grief for those who were killed and wounded? For their families? Does it mean that we ally ourselves in asserting our rage that none of us are safe in a world where such attacks continue unabated and unchecked?

Countering terror, fear, and oppression not only requires remembrance, grief, and rage but also solidarity and resilience. Some would say love. But as we noted above, not love as a romantic or generalizable particularity, but instead a striving for a sometimes seemingly impossible belonging. Feeling and doing the work of allyship means insisting on an end to the conditions that made Orlando possible. This allyship must look beyond narrowing and homogenizing media representations, calls for gun control or apocalyptic notions of a United States (and world) riddled by crime, extremism, and isolationist politics. Instead, an affectively queer allyship with Orlando must begin with a racially and queerly attentive politics that goes all the way back to colonization. It must build a community “negotiated through a particular affective circuit,” ⁴⁵ one created in both response to and as a refusal of the kinds of terror that made Orlando possible.

Countering that terror puts us all on the bathroom floor of the Pulse nightclub. The bathroom, as we noted above, is a site of what some consider to be the last (and first) bastion of queer (specifically gay male) perversion and trans* oppression. It is the material gathering place of all the queer detritus that seems to cause so much queer terror in a nonqueer world. The bathroom is also a powerfully resilient space and symbol of queer resistance, difference and counterculture. To lay together—to gather together—on a bathroom floor, particularly a public one, particularly in a gay club, is both intimate and abject, individual and communal. It is an act of defeat and immersion, desperation and release. It is both a depressive position and an apocalypsis. On that floor, the personal becomes political in the mashup of queer/not-queer, gender fluidity and diversity, brown/nonbrown. On that floor, we are all rendered equally dis/abled in the face of unexpected terror.

The “displaceable attentiveness” ⁴⁶ of queer affect on that bathroom floor, perhaps the last affective intensity some of those subjects experienced in this world, is a material enactment of the personal as political. The personal as affective counterpublic. The intimacy of whispered phone conversations, fear and hiding, are matched by the public release of those scenes, those words, the narration of the affects—and the emancipatory potential—of queer terror.

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