Illinois State University Recital Livestream
A note from Eris DeJarnett about Proof of Identity:
Queerness (in the anti-assimilationist sense) is built on countless things. And I’m not usually one to speak in absolutes, but I think for many of us who have spent years finding ourselves (sometimes again and again and again), two of the building blocks are often dreams and resolve. The act of self-discovery is necessarily predicated on a willingness to look for what rings true; maintaining that sense of self, once it’s materialized, requires dedication in the face of opposition.
Exercising this resolve is a daily act of calisthenics for queer and trans people, a mandatory reckoning of the risks inherent to owning our Othered identities in our day-to-day lives. Sometimes, we make hard choices to improve our chances of making it home safely. Other times, we are labeled threats and punished accordingly no matter what we do.
In this era where queer exterminationists are gaining ground, political fearmongering is just one face of the problem. Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer people are disappeared in vast quantities and Black transfems (and cisgender Black women deemed “not feminine enough”) are criminalized and killed with alarming regularity. Trans people have to become legal scholars just to cross a state line or use a restroom. Queer parents (and parents of queer children) have their fitness questioned time and time again. Nonbinary people are categorically shut out of ever having correct documentation, and our intersex siblings are quite literally scarred by legislative carve-outs specifically designed to strip them of the right to consent to their own medical procedures. Aromantics are pathologized and punished for eschewing the relationship escalator. Asexuals and lesbians experience the horrors of “corrective rape;” incarcerated transfems are sacrificed through v-coding.
The long shadow of the white supremacist eugenics movement which shaped turn-of-the-20th-century queerphobia looms over us all. Even as I write this, I can hear its soft hiss of a slur from times gone by: “invert….”
But regardless of the evils staring us down, regardless of the shitty compromises we might have to make to protect ourselves and those around us, we must keep dreaming ourselves alive. The ability to assert our own existence and thwart queer exterminationists is a vital skill, whether it looks like open defiance or calculated choices behind the scenes. The United States aims to rip our identities from our hands and disappear us into the carceral system once our documents can no longer defend us. We must refuse to lose still more generations of queers in unmarked, misidentified, forgotten, and desecrated graves, and we must do so by turning the tide and changing the minds of those who wish us erased.
And the artists among us have a duty to document, so the future does not forget how the government chose to de-person us by shredding our every attempt to identify ourselves.