Queer Intentions
Firstly welcome, and thank you for inviting me to contribute a few words. When I wrote the book Queer Intentions around the year 2018, I was thinking a lot of what I had read in Queer Theory of the past around the theme of assimilation politics and respectability politics – this idea of merging into mainstream culture to be accepted, the idea of erasing the less accepted parts of ourselves to conform. I wanted to apply this to what was happening around me as a queer person living in the West throughout the 2010s.
In the book, I drew on experiences attending the first gay wedding in Britain in 2014, seeing my favourite gay bars in London closing, witnessing Pride become more commercialised, and seeing trans people gain some surface-level visibility in the media. I wanted to explore questions like; are these signs of acceptance always a good thing? How do they make our lives better? What cost do they have to our radical self-expression and politics? Are they changing our actual safety on street level? And who from the LGBTQ+ community is left behind?
While we must celebrate the wins and the milestones, it is always important to question… to me, that is what being queer means, questioning. Today, if I were to evaluate how things have unfolded in the years since the book was published in 2019, I would say that the rise of fascism across Europe and America, possibly a backlash toward some of our legal and social advances, demonstrates clearly that the path to progress – that this idea of acceptance – is not linear. I have seen the struggle for liberation continue with the growth of incredible movements like London Trans Pride and the range of grassroots organising that has taken place in the UK – I am sure you have your own versions. Overall, actually, I think I have seen our own LGBTQ+ backlash – more of a sentiment of refusing to assimilate, a desire to do things on our own terms.
Cinema has always propelled and documented these tensions between the underground and the mainstream, the radical and the commercial, the fight for authentic expression and the desire to find safety and joy. I’m sure you can guess – the book’s title Queer Intentions is a silly play on the name of the film Cruel Intentions. But its meaning was more serious – the idea of intentionality captures for me the ongoing process of thinking critically, taking matters into our own hands, and shaping our futures as much as possible. While the landscape has changed since the book was published, in some ways more than others, intentionality is as important as ever. It is our power in a world that too often seeks to disempower us.
Thank you, and I hope you enjoy the festival!
Amelia Abraham
Author of Queer Intentions
