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research-article2017
QIXXXX10.1177/1077800417718304Qualitative InquiryHarris and Holman Jones
Section IV
Feeling Fear, Feeling Queer:
The Peril and Potential of Queer Terror
Anne Harris1 and Stacy Holman Jones1
Abstract
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.
Keywords
queer terror, Orlando, affect, queer feelings, allyship
We Need to Put an End to This
What happened in Orlando is not new, because we, people of
color, have a history in the US of never mattering, we have a
history of enslavement, we have a history of exploitation, we
have a history of criminalization, we have a history of violence
and that is what happened today. This attack was years in the
making and based off of hundreds and hundreds of years of
oppression and violence targeted towards queer and trans people
of color. The media will use labels like “terrorism” and other
things to get us away from understanding how our culture and
institutions like the media, like education, like prisons, have
actually been complicit in this attack, and are complicit in the
ways that our bodies are put at risk every single day both inside
of our homes and out in public space, such as the streets. We as
queer and trans Latinx people need to see what happened in
Orlando as a reminder that our human dignity, our lives, are
connected to the liberation of Black people, Muslim people, of
women, of trans people, and so we cannot move forward without
working with these communities to end white supremacy,
patriarchy, and that when we say “Latinx” we mean and it
includes Asian folks, Black people, Muslims, Native Americans,
and so for us, we’re one culture but with very diverse experiences.
We need to put an end to this because it’s not one specific group
that is to blame. It is the system that has created this violence,
since colonization started over 500 years ago.1
Terrorism, “The unlawful use of violence and intimida-
tion, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political
aims,”2 and hate crimes are both on the rise in the United
States and globally. With 49 killed and 53 wounded, the
massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando on June 12,
2016, was the deadliest mass shooting by a single shooter,
the deadliest incident of violence against LGBT (lesbian,
Qualitative Inquiry
2017, Vol. 23(7) 561­–568
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1077800417718304
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gay, bisexual, and transgender) people in U.S. history, and
the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since the
September 11 attacks in 2001.3
On July 22, presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton visited
the site of the attack and rightly acknowledged, “It’s still
dangerous to be LGBT in America” calling the massacre a
“targeted attack on the Latino LGBT community.”4 Clinton
also acknowledged that members of the LGBT community
“are more likely than any other group in our country to be
the targets of hate crimes,”5 and people of color still consti-
tute a majority of those numbers—a fact which should build
ally solidarity between queer and people of color activist
movements. But single-issue media coverage seems inca-
pable of bringing intersectional attention to the racist and
anti-trans*/queer violence that Orlando represents.
Following the shooting, most of the coverage was about
Omar Mateen and his motivations, his history, his orienta-
tions, and his thoughts and feelings. He was quickly proven
to have no formal links with The Islamic State of Iraq and
the Levant (ISIL) or other terrorist organizations, yet the
coverage continued to focus on him and the specter of ter-
rorism, rather than the victims as minoritarian subjects, on
homophobic and transphobic violence, or on gun violence
in the United States more generally.
Thus, while gains certainly continue to be made, queer
rights (like all other minoritarian gains) seem to bring on
1
RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia
Corresponding Author:
Anne Harris, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.
Email: anne.harris@rmit.edu.au
562 Qualitative Inquiry 23(7)
more hatred, fear, and vitriol from certain corners of majori-
tarian culture.6 We, like the trans* people of color quoted
above, believe that all our futures, “our human dignity, our
lives, are connected to the liberation of Black people,
Muslim people, of women, of trans people, and so we can-
not move forward without working with these communities
to end White Supremacy [and] patriarchy.”7 Efforts to
secure these rights, dignities, and futures must be
fought intersectionally from both minoritarian and ally
subjectivities.
José Esteban Muñoz writes about depression or what
he calls “the depressive position” as an affect/ive position.8
He draws on a mediascape9 that can “mimetically render”
various subject positions (not just depression) and in so
doing begin to affectively construct a “contemporary citi-
zen subject” who does not conform to the universalism of
the normative white subject.10 Like Muñoz, we are trying
to “resist the pull” of universalism and bear witness to the
knowledge that all we do represents the intersectionality of
race, gender (not only gender diversity but also violence
against women), and sexual violence. We are all implicated
by our diverse performances of our minoritarian and
majoritarian subject positions, including through and about
the massacre in Orlando.
Kathleen Stewart and Sandra Harding pinpoint the histo-
ricity of “apocalypsis” both individual and collective, tied
always to “race and racism, colonialism and terror, religion,
(ir)rationality and (anti)modernity, politics and rebellion,
economics, inequality, justice, and complicity.”11 Our
moment, less than 20 years after both Muñoz’s and Stewart
and Harding’s writing, is not the same. Our moment, some
might say, is one concerned with affect and emotions spe-
cifically because the acceleration of dehumanization in so
many diverse aspects of our lives is becoming so complete.
Syncing, scaling, commodifying—this is not the language
of affect and emotion, rather it is increasingly the language
of the media, of politicians, and of the academy.
Orlando is an example of both a kind of terrorism and
also a hate crime, but in what ways, and what do the two
have to do with one another? In this essay we consider what
we are calling queer terror, an affective condition not lim-
ited to LGBT or other minoritarian subjects, and its rela-
tionship 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 use the notion of queer
terror to critically reject the position that we are now singu-
larly and collectively living in an age of gay assimilation,
unprecedented visibility, and increasing political and repre-
sentational power.
Two Prohibitions
Ours is a different moment.
We’ll call our moment Orlando.
Orlando is no longer just a place, nor an event.
It is an affective subject position because of its media-
tized representation
of two pervasive prohibitions that have now become
subconsciously inscribed in modern consciousness, irre-
spective of gender, geography, or religion:
Firstly, against gathering,
And secondly, against feeling in an age of numbing
terror.
#Orlando.
*
First, Orlando as an affective outcome of an instance of
queer terror reinforces the pervasive prohibition against
gathering. Gathering is an increasingly suspect activity
which often has radical and life-taking consequences: it is
no longer safe to gather. But people of color and other
minoritarians (including queers) have been dogged by
this prohibition for centuries. Gathering together is now,
importantly, entering the majoritarian culture as a border-
less prohibition. The possible repercussions against gath-
ering administered by either the state or by madmen are
always felt now, if not consciously spoken aloud. The pro-
hibition against gathering in public—creating publics, as
it were—is a further contributor to the isolationism, fear,
hatred, and paranoia mentioned above. It is a contributor
to queer terror, a notion we unpack in this essay. Terror is,
ultimately, a queering of public (or counterpublic) gather-
ing, and thus implicates both minoritarian and majoritar-
ian subjects in its wake.
Second, Orlando as an affective subject position rein-
forces the danger of feeling, doing—or performing—and,
ultimately, being queer (LGBT). One reason activists
continue to implore a rapidly forgetting public to
#SayTheirNames is because queer lives have for so long
been erased by state-sanctioned violence. Unlike the
#BlackLivesMatter movement, which stresses the need to
recognize that collectively Black lives continue to be sys-
tematically taken and devalued, #SayTheirNames is a
reminder of the individuality of lost minoritarian lives.
Rhetorically positioning victims of state-sanctioned vio-
lence individually and collectively produces very different
affective and representational results in majoritarian and
minoritarian culture. One of the things that Orlando’s trag-
edy makes possible is the notion that queer terror produces
fear, hatred, and trauma in both individual and collective
minoritarian publics, though that queer terror is a feeling,
doing, and being experienced differently in “different cir-
cuits of belonging.”12
To understand the particularity and the universality of
queer terror, we call on Muñoz’s “Feeling Brown, Feeling
Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race, and the
Depressive Position”13 and Stewart and Harding’s “Bad
Harris and Holman Jones 563
Endings: American Apocalypsis,”14 essays that explicitly
and implicitly address the interrelationship of the prohibi-
tion against gather and against being queer embodied within
minoritarian queer communities and communities of color
as ways of attending. For Muñoz, attending happens in the
notion of depressive associations with being brown, and for
Stewart and Harding it is to be found in apocalypsis.
Feeling Fear, Feeling Queer, or the
“Problem of Belonging in Alterity”
We’re so tired of people telling us gay is good, now.
We’re tired of having to explain that queer oppression is
still an oppression.
We’re tired of trying to explain heterosexual privilege
still exists.
We’re tired of gay shame.
We’re so tired of speech not matching action.
We’re tired of waking up to another obituary in the
newspaper, another eulogy in the news.
We’re tired of both implicit and explicit queer terror.
And yet?
We’re alive.
We can keep speaking, keep feeling, keep doing and
becoming and changing.
Because we weren’t gaybashed,
Trans-ostracized.
We weren’t arrested at The Stonewall.
We weren’t murdered in a gay community center in Tel
Aviv.
Shot in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.
We’re exhausted.
We’re sick at heart.
We’re angry.
And we’re still here.
#Orlando
* who implore us to remember, to #SayTheirNames, to go
Muñoz tells us that “the topic of depression has not often
been discussed in relation to the question of racial forma-
tions in critical theory” and makes a case for what he calls
“the depressive position and its connection to minoritarian
aesthetic and political practice.”15 The particular depressive
position he looks at is aligned with “being brown,” and the
relationship between “brown feelings,” an ethics of the self
that utilized and deployed by people of color and other
minoritarian subjects who don’t feel quite right within nor-
mative protocols of affect and comportment.16 What Muñoz
calls “brown feelings” we are here calling “queer feelings,”
an ethics of the selves who don’t feel “quite right” in our
queerness, in spite of/in the presence of our whiteness, as
queer subjects searching for “affective particularity” and
belonging in an age of terror. We make this move in concert
with Muñoz’s “weak theorizing” by engaging queer and
critical theory as a mode to “know and experience the other
who shares a particular affective [and] emotional valence”
with us.17
Muñoz looks to subjects and particularities “both shared
and divergent,” rather than identities and identity politics,
when pushing Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s still-resonant
question, “Can the subaltern speak?” to ask further, “what
does the subaltern feel” and do, in the performative sense,
when dis/located?18 That is, the many and accelerating acts
of terror that populate our mediascapes today are no more a
cohesive whole than those who are targeted by its system-
atic randomness. The victims at Pulse were not all queer,
and not all Latino. The murders of 49 people and the injury
of 53 others may not even have been a homophobic hate
crime (as the Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI] contin-
ues to point out), but this does not mean that what happened
there was not an act of queer terror—quite the opposite. In
an age of terror, allyship does not pivot on solidarity and
recognition alone; it can also pivot on the understanding
that no one is safe, and the affective community created in
and though the feelings, actions and affective particularities
of gathering together and being queer.
Equally, today’s disparate disenfranchised, the maraud-
ing marginalized, are not always the subaltern that meets
the eye. We know that “terrorists” are not, as the media and
FBI would have us believe, easily categorizable as Muslim,
Eastern, racially, ethnically or religiously other; indeed,
more often than not they are “insiders.” Nonetheless, in
response, the state machine offers up these “terrorist others”
as justifications for committing yet more acts of terror, both
institutional (against nation-states and foreign civilians) and
individual (#BlackLivesMatter) acts of terror which largely
go unnamed and unpunished in the global community.
And so an affective circuit of terror thrives in the accel-
eration of deferred retribution. The murdered and murderers
become a homogeneous whole, despite citizen’s groups
out, and to resiliently feel things such as hope, unity, and
love—though here not love in the romantic sense but instead
as a “striving for belonging” that doesn’t ignore the seem-
ingly insurmountable obstacles to even “the most provi-
sional” sense of being a part.19
Still, the terror-affect grows and morphs like a conta-
gion. Only 10 years after Muñoz articulated “Feeling
brown, feeling down,” as a “racially attentive” politics “not
invested in the narrative of a whole and well-adjusted sub-
ject,”20 our recognition of “feeling fear, feeling queer”
564 Qualitative Inquiry 23(7)
proliferates beyond the boundaries and borders of ethnic,
sexual, or gendered communities. It is, as Muñoz has it, a
“position we live in”21 both in the world and in our under-
standings of ourselves.
Another way of considering depressive/liberatory and
collective/individualist approaches to subaltern feelings
and doings is articulated in Stewart and Harding’s apoca-
lyptic/millennial sensibility—a mode of attention, of know-
ing, and voice—[that] has come to inhabit and structure
modern American life.”22 Stewart and Harding23 suggest
that “apocalypticism and millennialism are the dark and
light sides of a historical sensibility transfixed by the pos-
sibility of imminent catastrophe, cosmic redemption, spiri-
tual transformation, and a new world order.” Orlando
exemplifies both light and dark in this historical moment;
the massacre embodies our terror, our solidarity with/as
allies, and our yearning for all four possibilities. As such, it
is more than mere fact or generalizable example of indi-
vidual or collective acts of terror and violence. Rather,
Orlando instantiates states of unease—not quite rightness—
and feelings of terror, or what we might call being or becom-
ing in (times of) terror. In such apocalyptic times, Orlando
is not an example of the kind of terror that has long threat-
ened racially and queerly attuned and subaltern communi-
ties of people in relation to a normalizing social sphere.
Instead, Orlando becomes evidence of a nation threatened
with destruction by “illegal immigration, race wars”24 and
Terrorism with a capital T. In focusing on just how and
where and who was subject to that terror and our collective
responses to those historical, institutional, and relational
violences, we affectively decenter—or queer—terror.
Is There “Emancipatory Potential” in
Queer Terror?
My general way
of being as a transgender person in the world
we live in
is to find the path of least resistance.
Every day brings a comment or two,
mostly well meaning,
that I could choose to object to. Most days
I’m happy to let it slide,
to acknowledge the social and cultural factors that
shaped the
comment, to smile, to joke, to educate.
Ultimately, to make the other person feel
comfortable . . .
People love an agreeable oppressed person.
It’s amazing how often
people congratulate you for swallowing your
response to someone else’s bigotry, like
it is an obligation for the outrageous choice you made
to be different. . .
Over the years it’s been the prime contributor
to completely eroding my energy for activism. . .
The biggest irony is that
if I reflect on it too much,
I start feeling guilty
for my own lack of response.25
#Orlando.
*
Muñoz asks us to notice how different “circuits of belong-
ing connect,”26 and how we, as minoritarian subjects per-
form, function and feel things within a majoritarian sphere.
Muñoz draws from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick27 in noticing
how
[P]aranoia has become a standardized posture taken in queer
critique and that it thus has become routine rather than
critical thinking. The paranoid move is always about a
certain hermeneutic unveiling of an external threat. Such a
move becomes routine, or numb repetition, and renders the
paranoid subject unable to participate in what [Hortense]
Spillers would call the intramural protocol of a displaceable
self-attentiveness.28
If Muñoz’s theoretic of “feeling brown” is a lever for
shifting identificatory constructions of race and ethnicity to
the “feeling” and “doing” of them, then in this lever, we
have some opportunities for “doing” or “feeling queer” dif-
ferently as well. In “feeling queer,” racialized subjects
intersect with religious, gendered and sexualized minoritar-
ian subjects to “do” minoritarianism differently. In this
worlding, the victims of the Orlando massacre were “feel-
ing” and “doing” queer in that club—whether they were
homosexual or gender nonconforming or neither. And this
is perhaps one axis upon which majoritarian others are/were
able to enter into this massacre as a tragedy. That is, not
only did people line up to donate blood or fly in from other
places to offer healing attention because they saw that these
victims could have been their daughters, sons, brothers, and
so on, but also because they saw that allies could be equally
punished for their affiliation with queer life, not only those
who identify as queer. As such, queer can be an affective
relationality (a queer feeling and performative doing), not
only or simply a relationality grounded in identity or iden-
tity politics.29
So if “feeling queer” is an “affective particularity” of a
collectively performed and understood time and place, then
those lying on the bathroom floor in the Pulse nightclub
Harris and Holman Jones 565
were subject to queer terror, as were the law enforcement
responders, the family and friends with whom the victims
did or did not speak before they died, the ones who escaped
the club, the family and friends of the murderer, and all
those implicated by homophobic, Islamophobic, and/or
gender violence. There is no one experience of queer affect
in response to this event, because affect is a particularity
based on difference and instability. That is, the affect of the
event is queer not only because it destabilized life for those
touched and silenced by it, but because it is nonnormative
and because it is aligned with queerness as a feeling and a
doing, albeit one “not yet here.”30
If we respond to Muñoz’s call to become more attentive
to particularities, “both shared and divergent,” we can find
in the Orlando massacre a kind of community, one that is
“negotiated through a particular affective circuit,”31 even
if and when the affect/s of that circuit are shared and diver-
gent forms of terror. Queer terror. Does Orlando then
become an event that demonstrates again the abjection of
queerness as a minoritarian subject position, in a cultural
moment which demands we agree on the “normalization”
of queer? Or can the event itself be seen as a further
“assimilation” of queerness, in its egalitarianism in mak-
ing us all equally victims of terror: queer or not, brown or
not, gathered or isolated, ally or enemy?
Affectively Queer Counterpublics
Clubgoers hiding in a bathroom.
On the phone with their brothers, sisters lovers.
Telling their mothers, “He’s in here” and “I’m going to
die.”
The phone going dead as they were systematically
executed.
This is a horrific specter for a family member or friend.
No one deserves to be hunted down in a bathroom and
shot.
No one wants to hear it narrated by a son or a daughter.
My own brother shot himself at 19 in a bathroom in
New York City in the 1980s.
It’s bad enough living with that imagined incident.
I’m thankful I did not have to hear his terrified voice on
the other end of a phone before he died.
Bathrooms have other connotations for queers, too.
Bathrooms are the sites of trans* oppression and often
humiliation, violence, and ostracization.
Bathrooms are sites of gender policing.
They are sites of potential performing passing “suc-
cess” for transitioning or genderqueer trans* people.
Bathrooms are also historically sites of sexual experi-
mentation, excitement and gratification for gay men.
They are not, generally speaking, places where any of
us
where an us of any kind
would choose to die.
#Orlando.
*
Muñoz and others including Berlant,32 Warner,33 Harris,34
Halberstam,35 and Dimitriadis36 have posited the notion of
counterpublics as a way of navigating particularities that
might move beyond the individual. Counterpublics are
more than alternative publics, however, as Nancy Fraser has
shown, and they are inextricably linked with the practices
and perspectives of subjugated and minoritarian subjects
who “ . . . have repeatedly found it advantageous to consti-
tute alternative publics.”37
Can the clubgoers hiding in a bathroom at Pulse night-
club in Orlando that night be considered a minoritarian
affective counterpublic? And if so, who exactly constitutes
that counterpublic? Is it Latino minoritarians, lesbian
minoritarians, LGBT minoritarians? What about nonqueer
others who were in or involved with those in the club that
night? What about Mateen himself? Muñoz reminds us,
“One of queer theory’s major contributions to the critical
discourse on identification is the important work that has
been done on cross-identification” and “queer chains of
connection . . .”38 Intersectionality is alive and well across
minoritarian discourses, practices, and scholarship, as it
was that night in Pulse. If nonqueers can not only articulate
but also perform (including dying for) their allyship, that
allyship becomes an ontoepistemological extension of per-
forming minoritarian subjectivities in the way that Muñoz
imagined—counterpublics of allyship, as well as queerness
and brownness, become an intersectional prism through
which individual and collective performances coalesce and
diverge.
Those who danced and those who lost their lives at Pulse
that night all experienced queer terror in affectively rela-
tional ways, whether they identified as queer or not. The
attack in Orlando binds us together in a “minoritarian public
sphere”39 of queer terror, regardless of gender and sexual
orientations or cultural affiliations. Queer terror becomes an
emergent affective experience that touches all of us in rela-
tion to the Orlando massacre—whether there or not, dead or
alive, Latinx or non-, gay or straight, trans* or cis*. Queer
terror becomes, through the act and its viral media represen-
tations, a minoritarian public sphere that can be shared by
queer people of color (QPOC) and allies alike. However, we
recognize the potential danger of nonqueers and non-
QPOC, through their coconstituting of this queer terror,
566 Qualitative Inquiry 23(7)
believing they “feel the same,” just as those of us who are
#BlackLivesMatter allies might risk believing we feel the
same as people of color because we experience our own
minoritarian terror. While we can share the affect of queer
terror and minoritarian counterpublics as a doing, we recog-
nize and respect that we cannot share the experience of
being that minoritarian subject, only the “flickers of recog-
nition” that pass between such subjects.40
Queer Allies and Terror
And why, as an ally,
should SJ Miller be relieved, grateful, that
he is still alive to complain, to resist, to refuse the
oppression and humiliation of being stopped by police
for passing as a transman
on a university campus in Tulsa?41
To be grateful to be alive, when others are not.
When others are shot.
Shouldn’t we, as allies, feel and speak and act around
what happened in Pulse?
Our non-Latinx or nonqueer friends and colleagues
worry that we shouldn’t feel or speak or act—
That we don’t have the right to weigh in on Pulse—
because why?
Because white.
Because lesbian.
Because ex-pat.
Because isolationism.
Because terror.
Because queer terror?
#Orlando
* Countering terror, fear, and oppression not only requires
Immediately following the attack, acts of ally solidarity,
including the efforts of those who organized blood drives,
established grief counseling centers and created fund-rais-
ers including a Go Fund Me campaign that raised around
US$20 million for victims, first responders and their fami-
lies, flourished. A heated, sometimes vitriolic conversation
about just who the victims of the massacre were and how
they should be identified—and thus included or excluded
from belonging to the community of those who were mur-
dered harmed in the Pulse shooting—as well as who could
or should be an ally, also proliferated. An article in The
Advocate, “There Were Straight Victims in Orlando Too,”42
mourns the loss of “friends and allies of LGBT folks” in the
Pulse shooting, though lists the name of only one nongay
victim (despite mainstream media identifying several
female victims as not gay). No trans* victims were named
in media accounts of Orlando, though as trans* and queer
Latinos who created the “Latinx” manifesto quoted in the
opening of this essay point out, this attack is, tragically, one
atrocity in a long history of violence against an ever-
expanding minoritarian community that includes not only
queer and trans POC, but also “Asian folks, Black people,
Muslims, Native Americans.”43 One Advocate reader
comments,
The article is simply about honoring the lives of our allies as
allies. Doing so in no way trivializes the homophobic motive
behind these murders. They were killed not because of who
they were but essentially because of what they believed, which
is no less horrific. We would not be where we are as a
community without the love, support and activism of our allies.
They should be cherished and should be mourned in the same
way and for the same reasons we mourn for all the others who
were killed.44
Others voiced the opinion that LGBT folks should “get
over it” because they’re not the only people who suffer,
countered by LGBT folks saying “don’t diminish my pain—
you wouldn’t say that to Black folks.”
More than a year later we are still, affectively, spectators
of Orlando as an event that is not, now, here. Even those
who survived have moved temporally beyond “being there”
and their experiences diverge from those who perished. So
what does it mean to “ally” ourselves to an event, to that
event? Does it mean saying the names of those who have
died, striving to remember their lost narratives, feelings,
affects, and living embodiments, just as we do for genera-
tions of previous victims of anti-queer, anti-Black, anti-
woman, anti-minoritarian violence? Does it mean that we
feel grief for those who were killed and wounded? For their
families? Does it mean that we ally ourselves in asserting
our rage that none of us are safe in a world where such
attacks continue unabated and unchecked?
remembrance, grief, and rage but also solidarity and resil-
ience. Some would say love. But as we noted above, not love
as a romantic or generalizable particularity, but instead a
striving for a sometimes seemingly impossible belonging.
Feeling and doing the work of allyship means insisting on an
end to the conditions that made Orlando possible. This ally-
ship must look beyond narrowing and homogenizing media
representations, calls for gun control or apocalyptic notions
of a United States (and world) riddled by crime, extremism,
and isolationist politics. Instead, an affectively queer ally-
ship with Orlando must begin with a racially and queerly
attentive politics that goes all the way back to colonization.
It must build a community “negotiated through a particular
affective circuit,”45 one created in both response to and as a
refusal of the kinds of terror that made Orlando possible.
Harris and Holman Jones 567

Countering that terror puts us all on the bathroom floor Love.

of the Pulse nightclub. The bathroom, as we noted above, is Do.
a site of what some consider to be the last (and first) bastion
#Orlando.
of queer (specifically gay male) perversion and trans*
oppression. It is the material gathering place of all the queer
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
detritus that seems to cause so much queer terror in a non-
queer world. The bathroom is also a powerfully resilient The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect
space and symbol of queer resistance, difference and coun- to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
terculture. To lay together—to gather together—on a bath-
room floor, particularly a public one, particularly in a gay Funding
club, is both intimate and abject, individual and communal. The authors received no financial support for the research, author-
It is an act of defeat and immersion, desperation and release. ship, and/or publication of this article.
It is both a depressive position and an apocalypsis. On that
floor, the personal becomes political in the mashup of queer/ Notes
not-queer, gender fluidity and diversity, brown/nonbrown.  1. Trans and Queer Latinos Respond to #PulseOrlando
On that floor, we are all rendered equally dis/abled in the Shooting, video in Ogles (2016).
face of unexpected terror.   2. Terrorism (2016), Oxford.
The “displaceable attentiveness”46 of queer affect on that   3. Wikipedia (2016).
bathroom floor, perhaps the last affective intensity some of   4. Reynolds (2016).
those subjects experienced in this world, is a material enact-   5. Ogles (2016).
ment of the personal as political. The personal as affective   6. Indeed, this situation has worsened in alarming ways follow-
counterpublic. The intimacy of whispered phone conversa- ing the election of Donald Trump and in the first six months
of his administration.
tions, fear and hiding, are matched by the public release of
  7. Ogles (2016).
those scenes, those words, the narration of the affects—and   8. Muñoz (2006).
the emancipatory potential—of queer terror.   9. Appadurai (1996).
* 10. Muñoz (2006, p. 675).
11. Stewart and Harding (1999, p. 287).
Terror. 12. Muñoz (2006, p. 680).
13. Muñoz (2006).
Terror wins when the surveillance of our minds, our 14. Stewart and Harding (1999).
politics, our lives is mandatory and mostly invisible, but 15. Muñoz (2006, p. 676).
our solidarity remains opt-in and we still don’t do it. 16. Muñoz (2006, p. 676).
Terror wins when we are afraid to be queer, to be differ- 17. Muñoz (2006, p. 683).
ent, to gather, to be an ally, to take a stand. 18. Muñoz (2006, p. 675).
19. Muñoz (2006, p. 683).
Terror wins when we accept that we might lose our jobs 20. Muñoz (2006, p. 680).
or be blacklisted for writing what we think in a public 21. Muñoz (2006, p. 681).
space. 22. Stewart and Harding (1999, p. 285).
Terror wins when we still participate in public space 23. Stewart and Harding (1999, p. 286).
censorship because to not be in the public space or 24. Stewart and Harding (1999, p. 300).
counterpublic space is death. 25. Price (2016).
26. Muñoz (2006, p. 678).
Silence does equal death, but not only in the way it used 27. Sedgwick (2003).
to. 28. Muñoz (2006, p. 682).
Invisibility equals death. 29. Muñoz (2006, p. 678).
30. Muñoz (2009, p. 182).
Above all else, be visible.
31. Muñoz (2006, p. 676).
So queer terror. 32. Berlant (1997).
Gather. 33. Warner (2003).
34. Harris (2016).
Dance. 35. Halberstam (2005).
Fuck. 36. Dimitriadis (2008).
Rage. 37. Fraser (1990, p. 11).
38. Muñoz (1999, p. 30).
Feel. 39. Halberstam (2005, p. 128).
Speak. 40. Muñoz (2006, p. 680).
568 Qualitative Inquiry 23(7)
41. Ennis (2016).
42. Ogles (2016).
43. Ogles (2016).
44. Beene, comment on Ogles (2016).
45. Muñoz (2006, p. 676).
46. Spillers (2003) quoted in Muñoz (2006, p. 678).
References
Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions
of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Berlant, L. (1997). The queen of America goes to Washington
City: Essays on sex and citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
Dimitriadis, G. (2008). Studying urban youth culture primer. New
York, NY: Peter Lang.
Ennis, D. (2016, August 16). Trans scholar haunted by fright-
ening brush with Tulsa campus police (Bilerico Report).
LGBTQ Nation. Retrieved from https://www.lgbtqnation.
com/2016/08/trans-man-haunted-frightening-brush-tulsa-
campus-police/
Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution
to the critique of actually existing democracy. Milwaukee:
University of Wisconsin.
Halberstam, J. (2005). In a queer time and place: Transgender
bodies, subcultural lives. New York: New York University
Press.
Harris, A. (2016). Creativity, religion and youth cultures. New
York, NY: Routledge.
Muñoz, J. E. (1999). Disidentifications: Queers of color and the
Performance of politics. Minnesota: University of Minnesota
Press.
Muñoz, J. E. (2006.). Feeling brown, feeling down: Latina
affect, the performativity of race, and the depressive posi-
tion. Signs: New Feminist Theories of Visual Culture,
31, 675-688. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/sta-
ble/10.1086/499080
Muñoz, J. E. (2009). Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer
futurity. New York: New York University Press.
Ogles, J. (2016, June 13). There were straight victims in Orlando
too. The Advocate. Retrieved from http://www.advocate.com/
crime/2016/6/13/there-were-straight-victims-orlando-too
Price, E. (2016, July 22). Facebook post (used with permission).
Reynolds, D. (2016, July 22). Hillary Clinton: “It is still danger-
ous to be LGBT in America”. The Advocate. Retrieved from
http://www.advocate.com/people/2016/7/22/hillary-clinton-
it-still-dangerous-be-lgbt-america
Sedgwick, E. K. (2003). Touching feeling: Affect, pedagogy, per-
formativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Spillers, H. (2003). “All the things you could be by now if
Sigmund Freud’s wife was your mother”: Psychoanalysis and
race. In Black, white, and in color: Essays on American lit-
erature and culture (pp. 376-428). Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press.
Stewart, K., & Harding, S. (1999). Bad endings: American
apocalypsis. Annual Review of Anthropology, 28, 285-310.
Retrieved from http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=00846570%28
1999%292%3A28%3C285%3ABEAA%3E2.0.CO%3B2-E
Terrorism. (2016). In Oxford dictionaries. Retrieved from http://
www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/terrorism
Wikipedia. (2016). 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting. Retrieved
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Orlando_nightclub_
shooting
Warner, M. (2003). Publics and counterpublics. Brooklyn, NY:
Zone Press.
Author Biographies
Anne Harris is an ARC Future Fellow (2017-2021) and a Vice
Chancellor’s Senior Research fellow researching creativity, per-
formance, diversity and digital media. She is the series editor of
Creativity, Education and the Arts (Palgrave) and has published
more than 50 articles and six books, including her latest Creativity,
Religion and Youth Cultures (Routledge, 2016).
Stacy Holman Jones is professor in the Centre for Theatre and
Performance at Monash University. She specializes in perfor-
mance and critical qualitative methods, particularly critical auto/
ethnography, queer storytelling, and performative writing, and is
the founding editor of Departures in Critical Qualitative Research.