Grieving Toward the Horizon: A Reflection on Orlando, Queerworlds, and Latinx Angels

Abstract

Section III 2015: So. .. Things are going to get better someday right? (Text message from J, 3 months before his suicide in a jail cell) We know the weapons, past and present: a police baton, a disease, a bed sheet, an assault rifle. (White supremacy, government neglect, stigma, capitalism, patriarchy, imperialism. . .). My queer family died in Orlando. And in the back of a truck, and in a police car, and a jail cell. My ancestors died before I arrived, but I believe they are with us as ghosts, they are here with us in every new death. (.. . This is an essay, [I think], about grief, queerness, whiteness, anger, and my friend's death; not necessarily in that order.) What is it to live with ubiquitous grief, with the trauma of probable death? We can ask this of Black Americans. We can ask this of transwomen. We can ask this of many queers. Is it a livable life if circumstances create a banality out of daily risk of death? Is it a livable life, Judith Butler asks, if it is not also grievable? Depending on which social media one follows, the nation did grieve for Orlando. But which Orlando? Gay victims? American victims? Latinx victims? How did grievers make sense of victims? Which victim construct provided permission for sorrow? Butler (2004) writes, On the level of discourse, certain lives are not considered lives at all, they cannot be humanized; they fit no dominant frame for the human, and their dehumanization occurs first, at this level. This level then gives rise to a physical violence that in some sense delivers the message of dehumanization which is already at work in the culture.