Queer of Color, Becoming (with) Nonhuman

Abstract

This thesis project explores the significance of visual entanglement, based on an examination of the ontological closeness between humans and nonhumans. I write through the mediation and with the materiality of a Chinese queer photographer’s works, Ren Hang. First, I want to recognize and articulate, quite speculatively, the psychic role of the nonhuman for queer of colour people. I am interested in seeing the roles of the nonhuman for the ontological articulation for queer of colour people. The chapter ontological anxiety gives an account of my own bodily experiences and serves as the affective mediation in my reading of Hang’s photos. I describe a XXX feeling and suggest to read it as a way of “speaking” based on the materiality of Hang’s photos. I recognise this feeling viscerally. The XXX feeling is not read through an individualised bodily account and is intended to follow Muñoz’s project of affective mappings. In the same time, I centre on the materiality of Hang’s photos, with an attempt to recognize and articulate a visual existence and its materialized effect that have the potentiality to exceed whatever framings discourse may perform. I am interested in seeing the roles of nonhuman in disrupting racialized/racializing gazes of Chinese queer bodies. Relying on the new materialist ontology of matter and a quantum thinking of the perceptual field, I find possibilities in the thinking of the materiality of race in the perceptual space which is ontologically indeterminate. Further, I ask, what is specific of a (self)-representation that might be read as performing a self-de-humanization? With an examination of the different phenomenological arrivals of the two forms of the “otherness” in the making of the Western Humanness, I argue the visuality of queer of color people and the nonhuman entanglement may re-direct, direct and/or, indeed, suspend the field of (de)humanization. This thesis aims to recognize a specific form of solidarity between queer of colour people and the nonhuman, in the visual and/or in the psychic. Following Muñoz’s affective mappings, I hope this recognition may engender a feeling of belonging in a larger collective scale.