This piece studies what is “in the making” (St. Pierre, 2018, p. 604) within queerplatonic love and solidarity praxis co-created by Trae, a Black American queer cisgender man, and Mani, an immigrant queer and genderqueer person from Oaxaca, Mexico. In particular this collective ethnography explores how Trae and Mani, through their relational practices of joy, play, pleasure and witnessing, supporting and protecting, are engaged in collectively liberatory worldmaking in LGBTQ+ nightlife spaces in the South and beyond.
This project emerged from a larger post qual study on queer kinship solidarity among LGBTQ + social justice workers in the South that employed a bricolage of Visual Narrative (collage), Narrative Inquiry (focus groups and follow up group conversations/conversational interviews) and Critical Analytical Practices Ethnography (Richardson, 1999). In this project we expand on that work, engaging in a more collective and creative ethnographic project where we engage story sharing, critical analysis and art as inquiry.
Through studying story and storying study we are learning and co-creating with each other, through inquiry, the ways that BIPOC and white accomplice everyday queerplatonic love and solidarity praxis is simultaneously strategic and visionary.
As a collective and relational ethnographic piece co-created among friends this work gives an in-depth, intimate and specific study/story. While this is powerful, we acknowledge that more shared writing could have brought a more multivocal experience to the work and thus hope to take that work up in the future together. Additionally, we think that future works could include more relations and engage more inquiry-emergent-art throughout the piece making the bricolage of methods more visceral.
Diving deeply into the ways in which Trae and Mani embody solidarity in the everyday with each other in the spaces of LGBTQ+ nightlife, this work offers readers, specifically BIPOC LGBTQ+ folks and their white accomplices, practical possibilities for taking up insufferably resistant queerplatonic love and solidarity in the everyday in the spaces of queer nightlife and beyond.
By exploring the everyday impact of anti-Black, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ discourses, policies, practices and the everyday ways BIPOC LGBTQ+ people and their white accomplices co-create liberatory possibilities with each other, we disrupt the all too prevalent either/or binary where the focus is either on doom and gloom narratives OR stories of resilience and resistance. Additionally, by focusing on and trying to live out, through the project itself, inch wide mile deep (brown, 2017) relational resistance and worldbuilding, we hope to contribute to a possibility model and encourage more thinking, researching, writing and living out power with relations for collective liberation.
We believe that by having (insufferable) queer-trans platonic love and solidarity across lines of difference in everyday, living, ordinary spaces be both the stuff of research and the how of the research project itself our work opens up methodological possibilities within collaborative inquiry and knowledge creation for more collectively liberatory praxis. This work makes contributions to perspectives on embodiment, space/place, affect, community, relationality and everyday resistance/activism and is in conversation with multiple areas of research including LGBTQ+ kinship/chosen family research; alliance, solidarity, coalition, critical friendship and community building research; and Urban LGBTQ+ Studies.
