The Brooklyn Rail

“Original, communal responsibility, greater than the individual, greater than original sin, but not accountability, animates the practice and consciousness of survivance”

–Gerald Vizenor ¹

It became clear during the COVID-19 lockdowns that surviving and thriving in today’s brutal late capitalist world requires community and connectedness to counter the alienation of screen living and rising divisiveness—conditions exploited by politicians increasingly fascist in their machinations. As Édouard Glissant frames it, the opposing, critical force of a “poetics of relation” refuses the division into “us and them,” reminding each of us that we always exist in relation. By “taking up the problems of the Other,” Glissant concludes, “it is possible to find oneself,” but oneself as relationally connected to others.²

Recognizing the necessity of relational connection in the face of violence, alienation, and oppression, Gerald Vizenor offers a complementary term—the Indigenous concept of “survivance” (Survivance, 2008). In spite of all of the violence, death, and oppression that First Peoples have experienced at the hands of colonizers, they do not just survive, accepting the inevitable erasures and violence of colonization; instead, they practice survivance, navigating state power and dominant modes of culture through evasiveness and assertiveness (as needed) along with irony and humor. Against obliteration, they wield their languages, creativity, and understanding to live empathetically in relation to each other and to the natural world.

Queer survivance is another mode of joyous and defiant relational existence. It must be differentiated from Indigenous survivance, not the least in the structural differences in how state power is wielded in relation to each minoritized community. In the case of European colonialism, Indigenous people around the globe were genocidally attacked by colonizing forces, beginning with the dawn of modernity around 1500. Queer folks are part of every society that has ever existed, and find clever, courageous, and often joyous ways to survive and thrive, often in defiance of a range of heterocentric cultural environments (on the historicity of queer, see Amelia Jones, In Between Subjects³). In both cases, survivance foregrounds the power rather than the victimization of the communities in question, stressing the communal rather than individual.

Most importantly, while survival is tied to the Western concept of the coherent individual self (in capitalism, implicitly competing with others for resources), survivance understands our interrelatedness and stresses our working together. Thus, working backwards from the above, in aligning queer with survivance and both with a poetics of relation, I draw here on my experience of queer communities with the web of relationalities they propose. If motivated by the travesties of the present, this theoretical exploration has been inspired by years of working with, supporting, socializing with, and following the work of queer performance artists, including Ron Athey, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Patrisse Cullors, rafa esparza, and Cassils. Among queer performers one can participate in the building and expansion of creative worlds, and of communities of lovers, friends, and co-performers, people otherwise hounded to the margins of art’s capitalistic systems, but who find ways to play, create, and love together.

One key example of queer survivance that grew out of the isolations of the pandemic itself and out of this network of queer community is In Plain Sight, a national collaborative performance event that took place on July 3-4, 2020.⁴ It was organized by esparza and Cassils, who enlisted eighty additional creators, from Dread Scott, Zackary Drucker, Harry Gamboa Jr., and Susan Silton to activist artists such as Emory Douglas and Cullors to generate texts to be scripted in the sky over numerous US migrant detention centers, processing centers, court houses relating to immigration cases, and former internment camps by professional sky writers. Each text creatively invited anyone who could see it to think deeply about coercive aspects of the US legal system oriented toward containing or deporting migrants, including the prison-like incarceration facilities where migrants were held at the time, which became even more deadly during the height of the pandemic. Each message—from Douglas’s cheery “HEALTH IS WEALTH!,” to Gamboa’s blunt “NO ICE NO ICE NO ICE”—ends with the hashtag #XMAP, which guides the user of social media to an interactive map showing the facilities close to where she stands.

Today, In Plain Sight exists as a website with extensive documentation, but it also serves as a continuing and expanding network, confirming as well as producing a community of progressive thinkers/creators connecting for the greater good. In Plain Sight both exposes violence and makes visible a multiplicitous community of creative people comprised of people who see such violence as unacceptable. Driven by communal commitment and expressing as well as soliciting joy, it promotes a poetics of relation and a form of survivance in a crazy and destabilized world that would otherwise divide and crush us under the imperatives of capitalism, militarism, and individualized power plays.

1. Vizenor, Gerald, ed., Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2008.
2. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation (1990), tr. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.
3. Jones, Amelia. In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance. London: Routledge, 2021.
4. Cassils and rafa esparza. Website for In Plain Sight, 2020, https://xmap.us/; https://www.4thwallapp.org/in-plain-sight; accessed November 22, 2023.