Crafting a Relational Queer Body

Abstract

In this article, I argue that Latinx artist Ben Cuevas uses knitting—a craft associated with traditional femininity and domesticity—to propose new understandings of relational queer bodies in an era of renewed and heightened policing and abuse against racialized subjects in the 2010s and 2020s. Relational queer bodies are those that not only refuse normativity and fixed categories of identity but also thrive on egalitarian social relations and interconnectedness. Moreover, relational queer bodies are defined not so much by their bodily presence. Rather, they are mostly constituted through practices of solidarity, affinity, and community building. Through his work, Cuevas defines the relational queer body as one that moves fluidly across discursive, meditative, and physical states. His knitting gestures and movements thus become the means by which the artist moves across various realms of the body. Cuevas’s desire to explore embodiment compels spectators themselves to experience the subjectivity of the queer body of color, to resist the dehumanization that a white supremacist society imposes on nonwhite and nonnormative communities. As an HIV-positive, genderqueer, and racialized subject, Cuevas’s decision to extend his bodily presence within the artwork becomes an inherently political act, one that is made all the more transgressive and provocative by the artist’s choice of materials.