Queer Worldmaking

Abstract

The theory and practice of queer worldmaking is a vital part of the study of queer communication. Rooted in the acts, activism, artistry, and the everyday lives of LGBT+, queer, and proto-queer people across the world, the theorization of queer worldmaking emerged alongside the founding of queer theory itself in the late 1990s. Surfacing in both José Esteban Muñoz’s writing on minoritarian performance and disidentification as well as Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s essay, “Sex in Public,” the term “queer worldmaking” was quickly taken up in communication scholarship, driving Gust Yep’s foundational work on “The Violence of Heteronormativity in Communication Studies.” Evolving according to various disciplinary demands and cultural influences, contemporary endeavors in queer worldmaking in communication studies largely follow three general paths: (a) drawing upon quare/queer of color theories to theorize worldmaking through/as enactments of disidentification(s), queer futurity, queer utopias, hope, and queer relationality; (b) conceptualizing academia, scholarship, and academic pursuits as productive sites for envisioning and creating queer worlds; and (c) tending to the worldmaking potentialities of queer memories, monuments, and archives. These intellectual pathways overlap, interweave, and split off into unpredictable rhizomatic directions, paving the way for scholarship that converses with, diverges from, and pushes forward queer worldmaking in communication studies in curiously queer directions.