Cette communication a été annulée. / This paper is cancelled.

My paper departs from an audiovisual analysis of Sylvia Rivera's quite notorious and politically significant intervention in New York City's Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally in 1973, frequently distributed online under the title "Y'all better quiet down". This potent speech emphasized a rupture with the dominant discourse of the gay liberation movement of the time, unequivocally underlining the societal, economical and affective lived conditions of those most frequently impeded from accessing the primary field of sexually dissident or corporeally non-normative representational politics: non-cisgender subjects, incarcerated queers, sexual and physical abuse victims, P.O.C., and other minorities all too often radically distanced from conditions of ethical and political legitimacy, articulation, protection and institutional support. The work of Rivera and others, including Marsha P. Johnson, within the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (S.T.A.R.) project, enabled other orders of political interrogation, direct intervention, community-building and knowledge-production. Despite the geopolitically and historically specific nature of this intervention, I wish to mediate it as basis for a reflection on the current trans and queer politics of the Portuguese context. Current choreographies of pleasure/power and renewed tactics of embodiment, community and activism, effect new materialities, sensibilities and interrogations. With a particular emphasis on recent projects, such as the Lisbon-based collective "Mãos de Cura", the trans-specific "TransMissão" association, the A.P. I. institutional structure, and a few other situated case studies, I intend to provide a sense of current new political mediations and re-mediations in the Portuguese context, using Rivera's intervention as an analytic pinpoint and precious cultural artifact, so as to generate a non-dualistic understanding of new circumstances of anti-cisheterosexist sociability, thought, and practice. I attempt to experimentally effect an emphatic cross-cultural political fiction, acknowledging the international dissemination of possibilities of communality and the reconstitution of informational and epistemic fields.

Speaker 

Salomé Honório is a non binary, queer femme researcher and poetess based in Lisbon, Portugal, currently writing on her doctoral thesis on the work of Kathy Acker, with a particular emphasis on intersectional and abolitionist critical modes of perspectivation and interrogation, so as to acknowledge the political violences her work reinstates and perpetuates as unaccounted exclusionary effect of her radical, dissenting literary will and experimental perspectivism.