What is belonging? For something placed third on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, before self-esteem and self-actualization, it’s a slippery concept.
To us, it is a sense of affinity, for a place, a person, or a situation. It might involve tangible, binding agreements, such as marriage or being a member of a club. It might only involve the abstract, where you simply feel as if you fit in somewhere or with someone.
But if belonging can exist as an abstract thing, then how do we know that it is there? How do we find community? How do we create and maintain relationships? How do we perform belonging?
We believe that these things – community, relationships, a sense of belonging – are performative. This means they are constructed by words or actions, and those words and actions are the proof that belonging exists. For example, we might claim the label ‘poet’, but might not feel like one if we haven’t written any poems lately.
Performing belonging, then, can be summed up in a question: what do we ‘do’ to make us feel like we belong?
A few answers to that question present themselves immediately: the linear progression from dating to sex to marriage to kids. That’s the script, through which we recognise many examples of belonging.
However, it’s not hard to see how that might be insufficient. That script may even be unnecessary or impossible for some, especially those who identify as queer. For us, ‘queer’ acts as an umbrella term for identities that challenge socially rigid binaries and labels. So, when the classic script doesn’t work, what do you do? How do you find belonging outside of that?
Queer belonging often discards these linear, normative understandings of belonging, relationships, and community. Instead, queer belonging branches out, focusing more upon chosen relations over predefined connections. We want to explore what this choosing of relations – this choosing of belonging – looks like: how do we create belonging, or, in other words, how do we perform belonging?
Again, a few possibilities pop to mind immediately: personal traditions, or shared habits, or non-normative intimacy, or political action. Maybe none of those build belonging; maybe all of them do; maybe it is dependent upon person and place.
We have no definitive answers to provide, but we hope you’ll indulge us as we try and offer our views on ways queer belonging can be performed.
>PART TWO – Performing Belonging – Counting the Ways – Lewis Brown
