#NoGoingBack: Queer Leaps at the Intersection of Protest and COVID-19

Abstract

The concurrency of quarantine and protest has highlighted the trappings of a modernist realism whose conservative solutions reveal a paucity of methods and dreams. The wins that the uprisings against anti-Black police violence have put on the horizon, from the dismantling of carceral institutions to the uplifting of alternatives, have been long seeded by social movements that demanded the impossible. This includes ancestors, many of whom Black, queer and abolitionist, who prepared to take fantastic leaps, in the words of the Combahee River Collective. The following meditation holds up this legacy in order to reckon with the racism accompanying this latest crisis, from the Orientalist origin story of the coronavirus to a global quarantine paradigm that is haunted by racial capitalism. At the dystopic crossroad of the pandemic and the uprisings, a multiracial and multispecies spectre of planetary interdependence appears. This is illustrated by a mutual aid movement that uses digital and offline tactics in order to norm beyond the normal. In the place of a state-led surveillance and a single-issue environmentalism that are hostile to those most vulnerable to the virus, an urban environmental justice becomes palpable whose methods are queer.