Tender Monsters by Jô Páscoa

Bring back my bricks

Last week-end rainbow flags, colorful floats, the beat of clacking fans and the sparkles of party-wear took over the streets of Amsterdam for its annual Canal Pride Parade. Every summer since 1996, thousands of visitors poor into the Dutch Capital to enjoy its two-week-long LGBTQIA+ Pride festivities, which turn the entire city center into an open air party. Last Saturday, August 1st, queer joy, homosexual affection, non-conventional gender expression and a significant crowd of cishetero allies could be seen anywhere you looked. Over my 5 years in the Netherlands, I’ve seen how festive images of World Pride were used as proof that basic rights for queer people have long been conquered here; that queer folk are not only accepted but also uplifted, praised even; but the more this image was emboldened the more skeptical I became of it. After all, if you look closely enough and ask yourself — “World Pride for which queers?” — the veneer of acceptability lifts.

On July 25th, the grassroots collectives BalikBayan, Lestari Bergerak and FiTe QluB organized a “radical, decolonial, intersectional block during pride walk” that gathered queer activists and engaged allies advocating for intersectional liberation, which included overt solidarity with Palestinians under siege. Israel's and other colonial entities’ tolerance towards queer identities is far too often weaponized to pinkwash crimes against humanity committed against what they claim are homophobic cultures or nations. Besides this, Amsterdam pride receives annual corporate sponsorship from companies complicit in genocide, such as Booking.com, who advertise rentals in illegal Israeli settlements, or DeutscheBank, who have financial ties with Israel and complicit corporations. Hence, I applaud the collectives and individuals who made sure that support towards a free and sovereign Palestine and queer Palestinians was loud and visible during this year’s Pride Walk. Unfortunately, the queer folk who voiced that there is no pride in genocide crossed a threshold of acceptability that the Dutch state and its corporate partners simply couldn’t tolerate.

According to first-hand accounts from Instagram (user names not disclosed for matter of personal security), World Pride organization banned Palestinian symbols and police prevented anyone carrying a Palestinian flag or a keffiyeh from entering Vondelpark, the Pride Walk’s endpoint. The amount of people barred from entering was so high that the local political party De Vonk started collecting video and picture proof of the incident on their Instagram account.

Instagram screenshot with a photo of police men and the text: "happy pride! Palestinian flags were banned by the @prideamsterdam organisation" — Instagram screenshot from @devonk20

This attitude from the World Pride organizers might’ve surprised many, but what else is to be expected from an organization that depends on complicit corporations for structural funding. Amsterdam World Pride sadly avoids addressing the complex political realities of queer folk who don’t benefit from hegemonic privileges such as a strong passport, whiteness or an able-body, while actively ignoring those who try to speak out for them.

Given this, I will take a second, as many others have, to remind you, the reader, that Pride started as a means of rallying our community for protest. Nowadays, corporate pride has an attendance that exceeds that of grass-root pride events, besides being a party for people who would rather believe that their governments, corporations and compatriots owe them entertainment rather than a radical willingness to dismantle hetero-cis-normativity and its ramifications. So, to answer the question of “World Pride for which queers?”, I will conjure the words of Brazilian painter and visual artist Francisco Hurtz:

“The culture of diversity is a way to reinvent capitalism, giving more color to the form, so that it continues to function in the old way. The liberal market used to sell products, then experiences, and now it sells causes and social justice because apartments are already full of stuff.”

This, in my view, is how we end up with denominations such as “tender queer”, championed by people who think performative softness and hyper intentional language will be enough in the face of a political landscape that is reverting to increasingly hostile attitudes towards the LGBTQIA+ community.

I am not opposed to Pride festivities. I actually believe they are a crucial first-contact point for young queers, late bloomers, folk who cannot celebrate in their home country, as well as hetero-cis people who are new to the conversation. Besides, big Pride events often create opportunities for many queer artists and community organizers to platform their work, which is also amazing. But, If Pride is conditional to corporate funding, political rest and an avoidance of intersectionality, then we ought to re-asses the festivity in its current state.

Screenshot from the logos of the supporters of World Pride Amsterdam's website — Screenshot from World Pride Amsterdam’s website

I am also not here to condemn queer joy, on the contrary, it should be emboldened especially in the face of growing hostility. But, if joy is the only emotion we acknowledge, and we forget to consider queer anger and pain, we risk turning too docile towards socio-economic systems that operate against us.

When faced with the commodification and domestication of previously dissenting queer identities, I started to look for tools and methods that could help me connect my artistic, curatorial and research practices with these rebellious roots. It was this desire that led me towards monster archetypes and made me interested in their historical relationship to queerness.

Monsters, camp and hinges

Monsters have always been among us. Whether by being an agglomeration of body parts, lustful blood suckers, or simply hiding in the closet, they feed our fears and outline the thresholds we should not cross. But, despite what their unusual appearance and preferences suggest, monsters are a mirror to humans. After all, we are the ones conjuring these creatures.

It is indeed true that humans have been using monster archetypes in stories for centuries, whether in literary form or as folk tales. The characters’ monstrosity is often defined by the limit they crossed or the excesses they represent. This is clear in classic Gothic monsters such as Frankenstein’s creature, which is made monstrous for its excessive body modifications, or vampires, which are made monstrous because of their excessive gluttony and lust. In the case of folk tales, I like to use the example of the mula-sem-cabeça (headless mule) a monster from Brazilian folklore. The tale goes: if a woman falls in love with a priest, hence crossing a social threshold, she will transform into a headless mule that spits fire out of its neck every full moon. Monsters are excessive beings that escape social norms, and as I grew conscious of this, I also became equally aware of their relationship to queer expression.

A pencil drawing of the top of a body in the water by Melissa Lettieri — Frame from Corpos D’água (2023) by Melissa Lettieri

The camp sensibility that we so often associate to queer arts and expressions is defined by its transgressions, its excesses and its disregard for conformity, making it hard to not associate it to monsters. This connection is even made explicit by writer, philosopher and essayist Susan Sontag herself in her infamous Notes On Camp, in which she explains that “the 18th century” is where “the origins of Camp can be found”, citing “gothic novels” as one of her examples. She also adds that “camp effaces nature, or else contradicts it outright,” besides also responding to “a person being one very intense thing.” In other words: camp is partly characterized by a sensibility for excesses.

Sontag aside, many queer scholars and researchers have made even more explicit connections between gender-queerness and monsters. One such writer is Susan Stryker, whose trailblazing essay My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix draws connections between her experience as a trans-woman and those of Frankenstein’s monster from Mary Shelley’s literary classic. Stryker explains that, similarly to the monster, she is “often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of [her] embodiment.” Meanwhile, Brazilian psychologists and researchers Bruno and Cello Pfeil make a similar case for trans-masculine identities in the essay Listening with Monstruous Ears: on Cisnormativity, Transmasculinties and Psychoanalysis, saying that:

“If we associate monstrosities with transmasculinities, it is because, in a way, certain monstrous traits resonate with us, especially in relation to their resurgence, their nonconformity with a single, uni-linear form, and their continuous capacity to unravel hinges.”

The hinges he talks of are the ones elaborated by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his theories on “basic beliefs”: the idea that, for every context, certain statements and basic knowledge can go by unstated, since they are the hinges upon which further thought is elaborated. This, as Pfeil observe in their essay, is the case for gender as it equates “the exercise of a hinge, of a certainty about what a man is and what a woman is.” Their point is essentially that both queer folk and monsters can shed light on preconceived beliefs about the human form and behavior.

An example that comes to mind is Brazilian drag queen, performance artist and internet icon Ana Mary B, who recently took the internet by storm with her unique make-up that hyperbolizes beauty norms and reveals the hinges they rest upon. Her classic look consists of thin and extremely angled eyebrows that seem to stretch her face, high contrast contour that exaggerates her cheekbones, overdrawn lips and extremely thin nose contour, elements that not only allude to surgical interventions but also hyperbolize the aesthetic norms responsible for their existence. The result is a face that morphed into something beyond human, something monstrous, and the shock or confusion one feels when looking at her is the moment when the hinges fall apart. Ana Mary B’s drag make-up is a form of queer expression that hyperbolizes the aesthetics of surgical procedures like face lifts, nose jobs and lip filler, in order to make their absurdity evident. As explained by drag queen scholar Rita Von Hunty in an interview: Ana is an example of how to use “marginality to criticize centrality.”

Ana Mary B in the audience of Maldito Paris’ first runway show in Brasil, image taken from @anamaryb_ on Instagram.

Another example would be Ballroom culture, in which categories such as "realness" or "bizarre" present themselves as opportunities to study or to go beyond hinges of gender and sexuality. "Realness" is a category in the Ballroom scene that focuses on embodying archetypes that can help one blend into cisheteronormative society. Some realness categories simply focus on passing as one gender or another, meanwhile others focus on professions such as executive realness. Either way, both are opportunities for queer people to dissect the hinges that these archetypes rest upon. Meanwhile, "bizarre" goes to the other extreme and focuses on embodying creatures that surpass the human form. Those walking this category often make use of exaggerated volumes, extreme make-up and elongated limbs to transform into living breathing excesses, hence surpassing hinges through their monstrosity. These categories scrutinize and destroy hinges through queer expression.

Two photos of Bizarre GP at the DBS awards ball. — Bizarre GP at the DBS awards ball (Amsterdam 2023)

Indeed, many queer artists, communities and scenes naturally actualize the logic of monsters, after all monsters and queer people alike have this innate capacity to dissect hinges. One might think we could end our analysis here, but now begs the question: Why does it matter that we, as queer people, claim monstrosity for ourselves?

Becoming a tender monster

Queer bodies in the Netherlands, despite seeming free, are still subjugated to a logic of surveillance and control, under which any dissidence that goes beyond established acceptability is met with punitive retribution, hence World Pride’s confiscation of Palestinian symbols. After all, the queer folk who championed these flags destroyed a hinge that has long been used to pinkwash Israeli crimes: that Palestinians are homophobic and hence it is just to wage war on them in defense of queer people. Given that the same corporations funding Pride are funding Israeli aggressions in West Asia, and that they cannot afford the jeopardizing of a useful narrative, it is no surprise that methods of control were deployed. The docile attend the festivities without trouble while the dissenters are labelled dangerous and barred entry. They are turned into monsters because, as explained by Bruno and Cello Pfeil: “the creation of monsters occurs simultaneously with the creation of control mechanisms.”

Sometimes, these logics of labeling and control are also internalized by queer people, who then unconsciously deploy them against their peers. An example that comes to mind is from a conversation between Afro-transfeminist researcher Maria Clara Araújo and travesti activist and scholar Natália Affonso, published by Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW). During the interview Araújo recalls an encounter she had in Paris with a francophone trans-woman of African origin, during which her self-denomination as travesti was put into question. When she started her sentence by declaring herself a travesti, Araújo was swiftly interrupted by her francophone peer who asked her to please not call herself that, insisting that Araújo is a trans-woman. She took a moment to explain the Brazilian point of view to her and reflected on the stigma around travesti identity that exists outside of Latin America:

“It was very interesting to me how this word can trigger so many different reactions. So, it is always a political decision to self-identify as travesti in front of people. I never know how people are going to react. Despite that, we feel that it is crucial to establish this positionality. The term ‘travesti’ predates the introduction of the term ‘transgender’ in our territories. [...] In Brazil, just saying ‘trans movement’ is not truly representative of our history. If I don’t name travestis alongside and separately, I am erasing from history people who have been fundamental to the movement.”

Here, Araújo revealed a hinge to her peer by opposing her misconception that travesti is insulting, because it is equivalent to transvestite, a stigmatized English term. Araújo also goes beyond and emphasizes the importance of claiming these terms for oneself in the process of de-stigmatizing them. This account helped me draw two conclusions: first, that Araújo’s specific context and the intersections she inhabits allowed her to unravel this hinge, second, that self-denomination is always bothersome and dissident while we live under a social order obsessed with taxonomy. To label something is to exert power over it, so to label oneself is to regain that power.

Considering this, and that queer identities are suffering from a process of commodification and sanitization, it becomes urgent for us to declare ourselves under more dissident labels, or how Susan Stryker puts it:

“Words like “creature,” “monster,” and “unnatural” need to be reclaimed by the transgendered. By embracing and accepting them, even piling one on top of another, we may dispel their ability to harm us. A creature, after all, in the dominant tradition of Western European culture, is nothing other than a created being, a made thing.”

All sexual and gender dissention will continue to be monstrous for as long as we remain attached to cisheterosexual hinges. Hence, monsters are the best possible role models for us as they can teach us how to reclaim our dissidence through pride in the rebellion that made us outcast. I propose that we dispel the tender queers and that we start embracing our innate ability to be unhinged. From now on, we shall be tender monsters instead, because, to be a monster is to become attuned to intersections as planes of cumulative struggle and doorways for solidarity and dissent. To be a monster is to be open to encountering our own anger and pain in a way that can return meaning to our joy.

Tender Monsters—my public-program for U?—unravels the questions: How can we express queer pride rooted in social transgression rather than adhering to politically neutral queer joy? How can we create filthy labels that honor the rebellious roots of queer pride? How can we reclaim the label of monster for ourselves? On Sunday, 8 November, expect to be immersed in a world of fantastical creatures where queer filth, misbehavior and anger thrive.