Tjerre Lucas collaborated with Hanka van der Voet as a research assistant, writer, and producer on the initiative Library of Unruly Fashion Practices. Together, they presented the project during the international fashion conference Ways of Caring – Practicing Solidarity, held on June 30 and July 1, 2022, in Arnhem.
The Library of Unruly Fashion Practices is a counter-archiving initiative developed by Hanka van der Voet, centering anti-capitalist, queer, feminist, and decolonial perspectives on fashion, clothing, and identity. In addition to contributing to the library’s initial design and production, Tjerre Lucas was invited to create new work in response to a selected text/publication from the archive. This commission aimed to (re)publish and give visibility to texts and ideas that have often been overlooked or excluded from mainstream fashion education and academic discourse.
Tjerre Lucas’s contribution, The Malicious Fairies and Their Fight for Salvation, took the form of a triptych of screen-printed historical pamphlets addressing queer liberation and the history of queer resistance, based on materials sourced from the IHLIA archive (Internationaal Homo/Lesbisch Informatiecentrum en Archief). Accompanying the triptych was an essay exploring the act of republishing and revising the history of queer activism as a means of resisting heteropatriarchal and capitalist frameworks of success, accumulation, and the commodification of queer identities and liberation movements.
The Malicious Fairies and Their Fight for Salvation | Abstract
Being invited to participate in the project Library of Unruly Fashion Practices I saw an opportunity to shine light on the often forgotten history of queer acts, queering1 narratives and queer ancestors. Via a series of screen printed textiles, I have re-published a triptych of historical pamphlets, found within the archive of IHLIA. Through re-publishing such liberational tactics, via a garment-like-object, I aim to place their content and contexts in a locale in which many of these queer stories have, outside the commodified manners in which we contemporary celebrate ‘pride’, not been seen- or heard of. As through the act of wearing it, its meaning will no longer only exist in archives or in spaces of critical and queer practice and therefore functions as an insurgent sharpening the tools for queer revolt and argues for non-commodified manners of celebration and remembrance.
Relating to the ideas of Paul Soulellis and his project Queer Typography, in which he states that “There is no queer typography, only queer acts of reading and writing”2, I believe that there is no such thing as ‘queer history’. When looking at history, you will find a defining narrative in which the history of queerness is often left out. Therefore when searching for [and publishing] such a history, we’re going to find a multitude of queer acts of doing, queer narratives and queer stories. Through deliberately choosing to abandon the term ‘queer history’ and use the phrase ‘history of queer acts’, I distance my practice from the patriarchal and queerphobic structures of historical writing and publishing. Structures that have produced limitational privileges that determine who it is that succeeds; and inevitably who is not written into history —
“For queer insurgents, then, recovering our history from obscurity and recuperation is a necessary element of struggle. If we do not critically engage this history, we not only lose analytical tools that could aid the spread and sharpening of our revolt, but also abandon the dead to vultures who reduce everything to image and commodity.”3
In the fifty years after the flourish of the queer movement, queer bodies have found themselves gaining rights and have seen a significant decrease in the policing of their lives. All of which ignited during the Stonewall Riots of 1969 and the early pride marches that brought queer people together and served as deviant gatherings in which queer people demanded action. Over the years, Pride Parades have morphed themselves from activist movements into colorful, joyful and sanitized festivities for the greater masses. In this transformational process from coarse activism to celebratory pride, we have seemed to forget to pridefully remember that the first pride was in fact a riot. We (un)willingly forget that the entire experience and existence of our queer bodies, eroticism and intimacy have been framed by the penetration of market relations into every niche of our queer lives and the stories told about queer liberation. “Desire is displaced from our bodies onto commodities that seem to contain all the best of humanity. The advertising industry seeks to mobilize this displacement, reminding us of the essential sexiness of every product.”4 Queer bodies then can only be desired insofar they can take on the allure of commodities; only becomes visibly queer through the deployment of particular market goods and services.5 In this context, commodification has created a fixed homogenous imagery on how the queer body must look, feel, smell, touch, celebrate, and inevitably exist. Therefore [queer] consumerism is in fact bondage. Queer identities have been framed, tied up in leather straps, ball gagged and sold as perfect commodities. “Thus, our communities exist largely in the form of exclusionary market spaces; our real diversity is obscured by the dominance of homogenous images.”6
To represent the coarse history of queer struggle and the unchained history of queer acts and liberation, I wish to argue for camp interpretations of these political pamphlets and narratives. Camp is a way of looking at things, a way of exaggeration and stylization. As Sontag noted within Notes on ‘camp’; “The essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric - something of a private code, a badge of identity even, among small urban cliques”7 But moreso, camp has shapen itself to be a private identification for queer identities using forms of self-satire. Therefore such a camp interpretation is not only a choice of style and aestheticism, it is a way of visually connecting oneselves to the historical subversion of queerness. Camp is, as Gornick stated, “a malicious fairy’s joke whose point is its raging put-on of the middle classes; those very classes which have always denied the homosexual his existence.”8 The campy queer might just be that malicious fairy; A malicious fairy that has shaped itself into a protagonist roaming between the dominant realities of the heterosexual, and the subversive realties of the queer, always chanting its existence via the coarse and devine visual and textual attributes of camp. I believe that camp and its seeming foolishness, exaggeration, and absurdity attribute to “its apparent critical weightlessness, its seeming unconcern with the problems of financial capital and the subsequent international divisions of labor, in short camp’s frequent refusal to be taken seriously”9, allows for critical attitudes to arise.
Revising the history of queer acts and activism within camp’s stylings, offers ways of existing outside the hetero-patriarchial and capitalist modes of success and capital accumulation. It is a way of blatantly stating our non-conformity.