poetics of crookedness: the power of the abject

NOTE: The original author utilises the Lithuanian term kreivas & kreivumas throughout this text. As elaborated later, this term is used as a kind of Lthuanisation of the term queer. Kreivas, the word the term is derived from, means curved, as opposed to straight (tiesus). In the spirit of abject and to preserve the distinction for readers, I have opted to translate it here as crooked, and only use queer where it is employed in its original form.

JESSIE: We’re Team Rocket, messing up at the speed of light!
JAMES: We may mess up, but we do it right!
– The Totodile Duel, Pokemon

I started my work on the poetics of crookedness a couple of years ago already. Around the same time when my carefully constructed cisheterosexual identity began to slide out from under my feet. At that time, nothing was clear and I desperately needed answers. What am I? Why am I the way I am? It’s difficult to exist normally in a system based on producing positive news when you can’t understand worth a damn neither what’s going on with your life, nor who you even are. It’s not pretty, it’s not orderly. It doesn’t create any product or possess any value.

A clearly defined identity allows you to be put in your place within the system, so there’s no wonder why the dominant LGBT+ activism, appropriated by neoliberalism, devotes so much attention to identity and its definition. Everything’s alright, we will accept you, grant you the same opportunities to live as all normal people (that is, marry and create a family), you just have to find yourself and be a useful member of our progressive western nation.

As soon as possible, I had to find myself, my place, my one clearly defined and finite purpose. However, one of the first things I learned studying in university is that there is no way to strictly define what a text is 'truly' about, as a text does not have one clear definitive meaning. Meaning in of itself is not about what a text possesses, so much as what it does.

The more time I spent thinking about my identity and my crookedness, the more clearly I realised that, similarly to text interpretation, I had begun asking myself the wrong questions. Because just like a text, crookedness does not possess a singular meaning, it does not fit into clear definitions, its expressions are many and evershifting.

At that point, I followed the example of two radically crooked counterculturalists of my childhood (yes, I speak of Jessie and James of Team Rocket from Pokemon) and did what I do best – allowed myself to screw up. After all, as Jack Judit Halberstam states, failure is one of the core qualities and strengths of being queer. Failure to fit into clear identities, failure to find oneself and one’s place in the system, failure to adapt oneself to a neoliberal meritocracy. Failure in which lies a radical political power.

Therefore, the poetics of crookedness are about this. It is a failed attempt to contemplate experiences of crookedness, its meanings and their developments, which eventually lead me not to finding myself, but to losing myself, which is something I hope for everyone to experience.

The poetics of crookedness are also an attempt to contribute to Gyvenimas Per Brangus¹ and similar initiatives, which seek to disseminate leftist ideas and critical discussions of gender and politics to a wider audience and create an alternative counterpoint to popular commercialised discourse on LGBT+ rights (talking about you, LGL²), but while also maintaining a kind of an autoironic distance. In other words, this is horrible anti-state cultural Marxist and genderist propaganda. If you read this, you’ll get infected.

But now I should explain the term crookedness, as to some it could (very understandably) be unclear as to what I even mean by this, and evoke some mixed feelings in others.

Not gay as in happy, but queer as in fuck you.

According to Laima Kreivytė, who employs this term to translate the English term queer, ‘it describes people whose sexuality does not align with the norms of compulsory heterosexuality (as described by Adrienne Rich): gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals, transvestites, and so on’. It seems that everything’s clear.

Even so, some reasonable doubts arise: a) queer means not crooked, but strange; b) the word crooked introduces too many negative connotations; c) crooked does not have the same history of usage as queer; and similar statements³. The essential point is that crooked and queer are two separate things.

The word queer was first used in 16th century Scotland. At the time, its meaning was strange, eccentric. Additional derived meanings began to emerge from around the 18th century: drunk, suspicious, sickly, and insane. Towards the end of the 18th century, the word acquired a subtext of 'sexual deviance', specifically to describe ‘feminine’ men, as well as men who had sex with other men. During the interwar period, this meaning of the term took root and eventually came to encompass anything that did not align with gender norms in appearance or behaviour.

Up until the 90s, this term was used to marginalise and dehumanise LGBT+ people. During the AIDS crisis, radical USA LGBT+ community activists appropriated the usage of this term and applied it to themselves, creating an alternative to the term gay, which originally simply meant happy. As was published in the manifesto of Queer Nation, one of the queer organisations of the time, ‘when a lot of lesbians and gay men wake up in the morning we feel angry and disgusted, not gay. So we've chosen to call ourselves queer. Using "queer" is a way of reminding us how we are perceived by the rest of the world.’

I was not alive at the time, but I fully believe that when an epidemic that arose from the purposeful inaction of the United States government claims thousands of lives, amongst which are your loved ones, friends and comrades, to call oneself happy is a tall task.

And so, queer with all of its negativity perfectly embodied the categorical rejection of both heteronormativity and conformist homonormativity: it is an opposition not only to compulsory heterosexuality, but also capitalism, militarism, racism, patriarchy and other structures of oppression. Queer denotes not only an identity, but a political stance as well. It’s precisely due to this that the term has maintained its radical political potential to this day. And even though the word queer no longer has such pointed connotations, and its meanings have been somewhat watered down, its use is still frequently regarded as controversial, especially by older English-speaking LGBT+ people.

It’s a different matter with crooked. First of all, this word has never been a Lithuanian insult, and has never been tied to a systemic marginalisation of a group. The only word in the Lithuanian language that has as many negative connotations is probably pydaras⁴. Truth be told, in certain contexts its use can also be appropriated. For instance, during this year’s National Day of Emancipation⁵, one of my colleagues called out to me in the smoking room by asking: ‘What’s a lonely pydaras smoking here for?‘, to which I replied: ‘Not a lonely one at all’.

Still, let’s all agree that such a term wouldn’t look so great in a text published by a culture newspaper. Not pretty, not orderly. However, using the term queer in a Lithuanian context doesn’t seem very meaningful either. To many Lithuanian readers, this term is only familiar in its sterile academic (as in queer theory) and popculture (as in Queer Eye) contexts, or simply as another trendy label, or as another incomprehensible CULTURAL MARXIST NEWSPEAK INVENTION!

Also, although the AIDS epidemic undoubtably had painful consequences in Eastern Europe, the social, political and economic contexts of the time significantly differed from those in the States. In other words, the problem is not that crooked is an inappropriate translation of queer, it’s that queer is not a very applicable term for describing Lithuanian LGBT+ activism, culture and politics. It’s the same as trying to apply the concept of waves to the history of Lithuanian feminism – somewhat anarchronistic.

It is precisely for this reason that crookedness as suggested by Kreivytė is so good. It can be used not as a translation, but a completely separate term, intended to describe a specific community existing under specific geopolitical circumstances. Now, let’s move on to an analysis of crookedness and its radical negativity.

We are the dirt under their nails, concealed by a French manicure.

Soon after the Lithuanian news portal 15min announced itself as the official informational partner of Baltic Pride⁶, a rebellious 15min journalist Regina Statkuvienė, taking a heroic leap into battle against the gay news media monopoly, wrote a critical article titled 'Why I disagree with Baltic Pride'. In reaction to this, her colleague Kristina Aržuolaitienė, embodying the true spirit of democratic discussion, published a critical response to a critical article: 'Why I agree with Baltic Pride'. Hooray, both sides have been heard out, democracy works, clicks are coming in, long live freedom of speech!

I would be inclined to ignore such a farce of discussion culture. Especially when the arguments for and against a 'parade of homosexuals' haven’t really changed since the first Baltic Pride in 2010. I mean, really? Accusations of exhibitionism? In nine years you could’ve come up with more evils. On the other hand, perhaps because these same arguments remain in the cultural consciousness year after year, it’s necessary to react to them once more. So why is there such a virulence surrounding homosexual parades, and why is it not enough to respond to them by saying ACTUALLY, it’s a ‘celebration of love and freedom’?

In the book Powers of Horror, a French philosopher and semioticist of Bulgarian descent Julia Kristeva examines that which is thrust beyond symbolicity – the other side, which is necessary for the existence of a subject and object – the abject. For instance, various excrements, carrion or corpses evoke fear and disgust because they represent a threat to harmonious human existence – death.

It’s only possible to see meaning in daily life when you’re not constantly thinking about your body as a fragile piece of meat in a bag of skin, which must constantly feed and defecate to remain functioning. If you begin to pay too much attention to this, everything starts to cause… unease. And all thoughts about bodily functions inevitably lead to the natural conclusions about their end, when your body itself will eventually turn to excrement.

What point is there then to do anything, to discuss and write pretentious texts, which will not be read anyway, if we are only anxiety-ladden sausages and will rot sooner or later anyway? Shoo these thoughts away! Away, I said! Biblical and Lovecraftian horror is so effective for this reason, because it elevates all the wastes of the human subconscious to a cosmic level. It perfectly embodies the abject – that, the approach of which would cause all reality to disintegrate and reveal the pointlessness and fragility of human existence. That, which is necessary to be pushed away to the other side.

There is something crooked in such a concept of the abject. Because every identity implicitly defines itself around that which it is not (every statement contains within itself a negation), identity that seeks to claim any position of power must exist only by thrusting out its abject. A cisheterosexual identity can only exist by creating a ghost of homosexuality, its antithesis, a margin, beyond which everything that does not align with heteronormativity will be banished.

Heterosexuality is understood as the ‘norm’ only because there is a predefined ‘non-normative’ position: in school I was first called pydaras, and only later learned what that meant. The abject does not need to truly get close – even the threat of approach induces fear, because the harmonious order is actually an illusion.

If heterosexuality was truly so natural, it would not need to be supported from all sides by Constitutional amendments and laws protecting minors from the negative effects of public information⁷, not to mention all the cultural codes and imperatives that are pushed upon us at every opportunity. It must constantly maintain its identity, remind itself of its meaningfulness and to shoo away all thoughts about excrements and carrion. Away, I said!

However, the fear that the abject will return and destroy the carefully constructed identity always remains. Crookedness employs this fear as a political tool. To say that ‘I am crooked’ means to accept one’s position as the abject, along with its destructive force: we are everything that you are not, that you find disgusting and justifiably terrifying.

Order and elegance in the land of the dead.

Crookedness is much more than just people, ‘whose sexuality sexuality does not align with the norms of compulsory heterosexuality’. Crookedness is the abject, the negation of any normative identity – everything that disrupts the peaceful existence of such an identity – and the anxiety that torments it.

Of course, it would be incorrect to claim that this is the only way to speak about crookedness. At the beginning of this text I wrote that crookedness does not fit into clear definitions, that its meanings are many. And I do not deny this. Yes, crookedness can be sensitive and warming, it can be the fragile being with loved ones or the unrestrained play of texts and quotes. All of these definitions of crookedness have their own context and there will be opportunities to discuss them, but in this text I want to maintain antagonism until the end.

There is some truth in saying that Pride is a ‘celebration of love and freedom’, because love is an incredibly powerful tool of political mobilisation. However, when a neoliberal order so insistently accentuates this ‘celebration of love and freedom’ concept, it commercialises and depoliticises Pride. It subsumes its crookedness into a symbolic system and assimilates it to maintain itself.

Oh, you’re gay? Here, have an H&M t-shirt with a rainbow on it, tune into Eurovision this evening, your tolerant MAYOR^TM will take a selfie with you at the parade, and then – an afterparty at Soho⁸. Just don’t forget to go to work on Monday, because that startup won’t create itself. Everything’s pretty, everything’s orderly, let’s celebrate love!

The statement ‘I am crooked’ is then a reminder that Pride is not a celebration, because there is nothing to celebrate when you’re a reject of society. Pride is a protest that originated as a riot. Pride is a confrontation with the abject, an act of discursive power, with which we throw the carrion right at the face of the current system and say memento mori.

-gd-

¹ Gyvenimas Per Brangus (eng. Life is Too Expensive) is an independent Lithuanian leftist news portal.

² The Lithuanian Gay League (LGL) is a local organisation that describes itself as ‘the only nongovernmental organization in Lithuania exclusively representing the interests of the local LGBT* community’. It is frequently critiqued by local queers for its largely neoliberal approach to LGBTQ+ activism.

³ Here the author comments: ‘I would add here that it would be better to use the term transgender and not transsexual, but this time I will reserve my political correctness for myself. After all, that article was published in the middle of the 2000s, a time when no one knew how to dress or what terms to use’.

⁴ The term pydaras is derived from the word pederast. I hope I do not need to explain the derogatory nature and homophobia contained within this term’s usage towards LGBTQ+ people.

⁵ The National Day of Emancipation is a local yearly conference that takes place around February 17th, focused on the discussion of the quality of democracy, gender equality and emancipation of marginalised groups in Lithuania. Not to be confused with Juneteenth.

⁶ Baltic Pride is a corporate Pride event organised by the aforementioned LGL. It takes place in the country every three years.

⁷ In reference to the Lithuanian Law of Protection of Minors from Negative Effects of Public Information, which contains a clause that protects minors from ‘information that disparages family values and encourages concepts of marriage and family that do not align with those described by the Constitution or Civil Code‘. As the Lithuanian Constitution and Civil Code only recognises heterosexual marriages, this clause has been used to censor information about LBGTQ+ people. At time of translation (2023/03/11), this clause is still in effect.

⁸ Soho is the most well-known gay club in Lithuania.