Qualitative Inquiry

I looked at the call for papers, “Poetic responses to Orlando” and paused. Should I contribute? And then I thought, how could I hide in the safety of my so-called normality and straightness when others may have become afraid to dance? So I invited my friends to join me in a poetic response.

I first learned about the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, through the television. Popular news anchors provided “on the scene” reporting. I saw interviews with officials, with those present at the shooting, and with families and friends of victims. The media narrative unfolded against a visual backdrop of the club, almost always a great distance off, blocked by police cars and tape. I thought hard about that distance. I felt the repetition of the information, the personalization of the event through “selfie” photos of individual victims, and the witness accounts emphasizing the ringing of cell phones in the silence following the rampage. Reporters discussed the killer’s radical politics and his use of social media during his killing spree. Beyond these details of an emergent tragedy, though, was a well-rehearsed, overly familiar narrative frame. A recurring spectacle now grows less and less spectacular.

Weeks’s (2011) article on gender-inclusive housing explained, “The roommate you choose can be gay or straight or whatever.” This provoked a spoken-word response to Weeks and a call for seeing drag as a curricular technology. The piece invokes a drag performance the author performed in 2012, used as a teaching performance that queered the historic treatment and criticized the contemporary hypocrisy of the Catholic Church’s stance towards LGBTQ+ people.

This autopoetic narrative centers on identity negotiation in a time of crisis and how we learn and unlearn to respond. After compartmentalizing my sensitivity to gun violence, the Orlando Pulse shooting resurrected in me a strong sense of grief, connection and suffering.

The massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, impacted the lives of queer people across the world. As a gay White male living hundreds of miles from the horrific events, I was intimately connected with the aftermath through social media, blogs, and news reports. Through autoethnographic exploration of three distinct text-based digital conversations in the days following the massacre, I reflect on the ways that virtual and nonvirtual communication intra-acted to produce and mediate powerful emotional moments. As a performative work told in three(ish) acts, I contextualize these conversations in the fears, desires, and frustrations of my lived experience.

Following in the tradition of poetic inquiry, I offer a series of poems to explore the aftermath of Orlando, Florida shooting on June 12, 2016. The poems call upon the speculative and the imaginative to make its empathic case. The poems, offering distinct perspectives directly connected to the shooting, rely upon news accounts, but do not contain the specific words of any individual.

Gun violence generally and mass shootings in particular have increased dramatically over the past decade. The tragedy inherent in those incidents is magnified by our collective inability to find reasonable avenues for remediating the root causes of such action. Moreover, the ways in which many individuals process such events is to contort the context to suit their existing world view. We can and must do better.

Pulse/Second Birth is a poetic response to the Pulse gay club shooting of June, 2016. Following the work modeled by Sandra Faulkner in Poetry as Method (2009), this poem leans into the ways that we may use autoethnographic writing as therapy or sense-making during times of community trauma. Attending to relevant conversations in autoethnography around therapy and aesthetic writing through praxis, the poem reaches towards the hope of queer survival on the horizon.

What if we expressed critical qualitative inquiry is/as love?

This reflective essay uses an instance of gestural solidarity forged during Petrichor, a senior thesis performance at Princeton University created by transgender artist Bree White, to probe both the “Keep Dancing Orlando” video made in response to the horror of June 12, 2016, and, more broadly, the specific mechanisms through which dance creates communities of shared labor across difference in troubled times. It posits the reach—the moment when outstretched arms move toward, for, and sometimes with another—as the kinesthetic unit incarnating dance’s political-affective potential.

Queer Ugandans operate as identity fugitives, a term to describe the ways gay and lesbian Ugandans cannot share their whole selves in the public domain and sometimes even in policed private spheres. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) organizers have responded by creating refuges for endangered and alienated queer Ugandans. These spaces are sacred because they resist homophobic sites of hostility throughout Uganda. In June of 2016, the Ugandan LGBTQ community commemorated victims of the Orlando massacre in the United States as they meditated on the fragility of queer life globally. The violence at Pulse nightclub in Orlando reinforced the precariousness of these cultivated sacred spaces. The LGBTQ community in Uganda bravely commemorated the victims of the massacre by creating a transnational site of mourning, one that highlighted the dynamism of queer expression even under government sanctioned societal oppression.

Living in a small southern town, my narrative performance explores the anger, pain, and, at times, privilege of isolation when not having a queer community with whom to publicly mourn following the massacre at Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Complicating this further is my dissonance as to whether or not the Orlando Latinx community is, in fact, my community at all to mourn. When finally finding and attending a vigil a town away, my identity as a queer femme woman was pushed to the side to make way for anti–second-amendment speeches, a political campaign opportunity, and a Muslim man trying to prevent Islamophobia. Weaving the metaphor of the brewing storm with my narrative of the problematics of small town advocacy, what unfolds is a collision of my identities crashing into my prejudicial thoughts and ideas, despite espousing “good liberal,” antiracist, and intersectional politics. Ending with more questions than answers, I narrate the ways in which difference is erased in my small town, and yet, how simultaneously those of us fighting for social justice learn to negotiate challenges together, forging coalitions between people of differences.

This essay considers what we are calling queer terror, an affective condition not limited to LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) 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 ask whether, through the act and its viral media representations, queer terror creates minoritarian public sphere that can be shared by queer people of color (QPOC) and allies alike. This affectively queer allyship begins with a racially and queerly attentive politics and seeks community both in response to and as a refusal of the kinds of terror that made Orlando possible.